Gloria Conyers Hewitt

She was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation postdoctoral Science Faculty Fellowship. She was elected to the board of governors of the Mathematical Association of America. Her accomplishments have also earned her recognition by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2018 Honoree. In 2018, the University of Washington established the Gloria Hewitt Endowed Graduate Student Support Fund in honor of Hewitt's immense contributions to the field of mathematics. The fund, established with an initial principal amount of $50,000, was set up to “promote excellence in the graduate program of the Department of Mathematics, in particular enhancing efforts to achieve a more equitable representation of those under-represented in the field of mathematics.’’

While a professor at the University of Montana she participated in multiple other organizations. She served on the executive council of the mathematical honor society, Pi Mu Epsilon. She served as the chair of the committee that writes questions for the mathematics section of the GREs. Hewitt was also a faculty consultant for the Advanced Placement examination in calculus. In 1995, she was awarded an ETS Certificate of Appreciation after twelve years of service.

In 1961, Hewitt joined the faculty at the University of Montana. In 1966 she became tenured and promoted to associate professor, then in 1972, to full professor. In 1995, she was elected chair of the Department of Mathematical Science. She served in that position until she retired in June 1999, with the title of Professor Emeritus.

Gloria Conyers Hewitt (born 1935) is an American mathematician. She was the fourth African-American woman to receive a PhD in Mathematics. Her main research interests were in group theory and abstract algebra. She is the first African American woman to chair a math department in the United States.

Hewitt was born on October 26, 1935 in Sumter, South Carolina. She entered Fisk University in 1952 and graduated in 1956 with a degree in secondary mathematics education. Without her knowledge, department chairman Lee Lorch recommended Hewitt to two graduate schools. As a result, she was offered a fellowship at the University of Washington in her senior year, though she had not applied for it. Hewitt received her masters from there in 1960, and then her Ph.D. (with a thesis on "Direct and Inverse Limits of Abstract Algebras") in 1962.