Lecture Commemorating African American History Month
In February 2024, Durham University hosted a Black History Month Lecture delivered by Dr. Nazar Miheisi, a Senior Lecturer at King's College London. The lecture, which can be found on YouTube, highlighted several prominent Black mathematicians who have made significant contributions to the field.
Dr. Miheisi spoke about the work of Katherine Johnson, a NASA mathematician known for her calculations that were critical to space missions. He also mentioned David Blackwell, a statistician and pioneer in game theory and Bayesian statistics. Euphemia Lofton Haynes, the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, and Benjamin Banneker, an early African American mathematician and astronomer, were also mentioned.
However, for the specific names Dr. Miheisi mentioned during his lecture, it's best to refer to the event recording or materials provided by Durham’s Black History Month programming.
Among Dr. Miheisi's personal mathematical heroes are Prof. Idris Assani, Professor of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Prof. Scott Williams, Professor of Mathematics at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Raymond Johnson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, and George Okikiolu, a British-Nigerian Mathematician and inventor, were also included in his list of heroes.
Dr. Miheisi's lecture focused on averages with arithmetic weights and discussed interesting results at the intersection of ergodic theory, number theory, and analysis.
Interested parties can find more information about undergraduate courses in Mathematics at Durham University online. The Department of Mathematical Sciences, which is ranked in the top 10 in the UK according to the Complete University Guide 2025, also provides more information on their webpages.
Before joining King's College London in 2017, Dr. Miheisi was part of the Researchers in Schools programme in 2015. He completed his PhD thesis on convolution operators and function algebras at the University of Leeds in 2012, under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Partington.
For those seeking more information about EDI activities at Durham University, it can be found online.
Education and self-development play a significant role in Dr. Miheisi's academic journey, as he lists several mathematics professors and mathematicians, such as Prof. Idris Assani, Prof. Scott Williams, Raymond Johnson, George Okikiolu, and Katherine Johnson, among his personal heroes in learning. Learning from these individuals contributes to his ongoing pursuit of knowledge in the field of mathematics.
