Dwight Anderson Williams II

Williams is a Black man math-ing: A supermathematician by training, he studies Lie superalgebras and related associative superalgebras, which contribute to solving physical equations as an application of (super) representation theory. Combinatorics is another area within mathematics that Williams has investigated. Along with some wonderful math friends, including undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, junior/senior faculty, and helpful contributors, he researches generalized parking functions. All these activities help encourage Williams to stay active in the greater mathematical community; however, pain, politics, and undue persistence have factored into his journey, as well. In practice and by research, Williams organizes with various teams and collaborators to note how White supremacy manifests in (or as) mathematics and how Black people (and the “othered” more generally) live as stated and unstated mathematicians: What is mathematical beauty in a world of ugly systems?

Dissertation: Dwight Anderson Williams II. “Bases of Infinite-Dimensional Representations of Or-thosymplectic Lie Superalgebras”. PhD thesis. Arlington, TX: The University of Texas at Arlington, 2020.

(Joint with Yasmin Aguillon, Dylan Alvarenga, P. E. Harris, Surya Kotapati, J. Carlos Martínez Mori, Casandra D. Monroe, Zia Saylor, Camelle Tieu)
On parking functions and the Tower of Hanoi. To appear in The American Mathematical Monthly.

(Joint with J.T. Hartwig)
Diagonal reduction algebra for osp(1|2). Theoretical and Mathematical Physics 210.2 (Feb. 2022), pp. 155–171. doi:10.1134/S0040577922020015:2106.04380.

(Joint with J.T. Hartwig)
Ghost center and representations of the diagonal reduction algebra of osp(1|2).

(C. Westine, S. Sword, M. Young, Maya Bartel, D. A. Williams II, P. E. Harris)
Informing Change: Stories of Graduate Students from Underrepresented Groups in Mathematics Doctoral Programs. Association for the Study of Higher Education 46th General Conference. Proceedings.

(S. Sword, M. Young, C. Westine, A. Winger, Maya Bartel, D. A. Williams II, Christian McRoberts, S. Sisneros-Thiry, M. Gates, P. E. Harris)
Studying Successful Doctoral Students in Mathematics from Underrepresented Groups. Transforming Institutions 2021 Virtual Conference.

(R. Garcia, P. E. Harris, D. A. Williams II, Casandra Monroe, J. Carlos Martínez Mori, Tomás Aguilar-Fraga, Yasmin Aguillon, Daniel Alofamoni Quiñonez, Dylan Alvarenga, Aalliyah Celestine, Parneet Gill, Imhotep B. Hogan, Jakeyl Johnson, Kobe Lawson-Chavanu, Lina Liu, Aaron Ortiz, Lauren Quesada, Cynthia Marie Rivera Sánchez, Christopher Soto, Camelle Tieu, Dirk Tolson III, Jacob van der Leeuw, Pamela Vargas)
People Over Math: A Co-created Principle for Successful Research Communities. MAA Focus 42.3 (2022), pp. 26–31.