Nkechi Agwu

"I was the only female and the only Black person in my master’s in mathematics program at the University of Connecticut."

"Then at Syracuse University, I was the only Black person in the Ph.D. in mathematics education program."

"Once you’ve been a refugee of war—I grew up in refugee camps in Equatorial Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone—you can survive anything,"

"I know the importance of trying to get women and underrepresented minorities into mathematics."

"Women of African heritage comprise less than one percent of the women who make up 30 percent of students in Ph.D. math programs."

"Mathematics is all around us, it is in the numbers we use, it’s in the patterns our mothers use in weaving it’s in the architecture of our homes, it’s in the symbolism that we use for divination and healing, so a child growing up wherever they are growing up has a natural exposure to mathematics but they may not know that what they are seeing is mathematical until you show them how it relates to the abstract concepts."