Sylvia Bozeman

Sylvia D. Trimble Bozeman (née Sylvia Trimble, 1947) is a Black American mathematician and mathematics educator.

Born in rural Alabama, Bozeman attended segregated primary and secondary schools in Camp Hill, and was encouraged by her teachers and parents to continue her education.

Bozeman did her undergraduate studies in mathematics at Alabama A&M University, during which she also worked on summer projects at NASA and Harvard University. She graduated in 1968 as salutatorian and moved with her husband Robert, also a mathematician, to non-segregated Vanderbilt University, where they both began their graduate studies. She earned a master's degree in 1970, despite not having studied much of the prerequisite coursework that her white classmates had. The Bozemans had a son and a daughter while Sylvia taught part-time at Vanderbilt and Tennessee State University and Robert finished his doctoral studies in mathematics.

In 1974, Bozeman took a teaching position at Spelman College, a college for Black women in Atlanta, Georgia; Robert was then teaching at Morehouse College, another historically Black college. While there, she worked under Shirley Mathis McBay, Etta Zuber Falconer, and Gladys Glass, mathematicians and chemists who were pushing to improve Spelman's science and mathematics programs. In 1976, Bozeman took up graduate studies again at Emory University while continuing to hold a position at Spelman. She earned her doctorate in 1980 from Emory, under the supervision of Luis Kramarz and John Neuberger; her thesis was titled Representations of Generalized Inverses of Fredholm Operators.

Bozeman continues to work as a professor at Spelman, and has also held the position of vice provost there. Her research there has focused on functional analysis and image processing, and has been funded by the Army Research Office, National Science Foundation, and NASA. In 1997 she became Section Governor in the Mathematical Association of America, the first African-American to reach that level. In 2012, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.