Thyrsa Anne Frazier Svager (June 16, 1930 – July 23, 1999) was an American academic who was one of the first African-American woman to gain a PhD in mathematics.[1] Born in Ohio, she graduated from high school at the age of 16, going to Antioch College in Ohio and then doing her postgraduate degrees at Ohio State University.[2] Frazier Svager was the head of the Department of Mathematics at Central State University (CSU) in Ohio for decades, ending her academic career as provost and dean for academic affairs.[3] She and her husband, physics professor Aleksandar Svager, invested one of their salaries during their careers to build a legacy for scholarships.[4][5] After her death, the Thyrsa Frazier Svager Fund was established to provide scholarships for African-American women majoring in mathematics.[6]
Early life and education
Frazier Svager was born Thyrsa Anne Frazier on June 16, 1930, in Wilberforce, Ohio.[2] Her mother, Elizabeth Anne Frazier, taught speech at Central State University (CSU), a historically black university in Wilberforce, Ohio.[3] Her father, G. Thuton Frazier, headed the Logistics Department at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.[3] He was a member of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, holding the position of Provence Polemarch.[3][7] Frazier Svager had three sisters, Gail, Constance and Jane, and a brother, William Lafayette.[3][2]
Frazier Svager graduated from Wilberforce University Preparatory Academy in Ohio at the age of 16 in 1947, as class valedictorian.[2][8] She attended Antioch College, a private liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, majoring in mathematics, with a minor in chemistry, and placed in the 99th percentile in the Princeton Senior Student Examination.[9] Frazier Svager was one of only four black students at Antioch: one of the others was Coretta Scott King, with whom she was friends.[8]
She gained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Antioch in 1951, going on to gain a master's (1952) and PhD from Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus in 1965, where Paul Reichelderfer was her doctoral advisor.[10][11] Her dissertation was titled "On the product of absolutely continuous transformations of measure spaces".[12]
In 1967, Frazier Svager was appointed chairman of the department of mathematics.[13] She was awarded tenure in 1970.[14][10] She spent a summer in DC in 1966 as a systems analyst at NASA, as visiting faculty at MIT in 1969, and in 1985, she undertook postdoctoral study at OSU during the summer.[2] She was provost and vice president for academic affairs when she retired in 1993.[8][2] In March 1995, she returned for a short time to CSU as Interim President.[2]
She wrote two books, CSU's Modern Elementary Algebra Workbook (1969),[16] and Essential Mathematics for College Freshmen (1976).[17]
Personal life
While on the CSU faculty, Frazier met Aleksandar Svager, a Holocaust survivor from Yugoslavia and physics professor at CSU.[4][5] They married in June 1968 at her parents' home.[18]
Both university professors with a strong commitment to furthering education opportunities, the Svagers lived on one income, investing the other to build a scholarship fund.[5] After her death, her husband established the Thyrsa Frazier Svager Fund at the Dayton Foundation, for African-American women who major in mathematics at one of six universities, with a legacy contribution planned.[6][5] As of February 2017, 33 women had received support from the Fund.[5] An annual contribution is also being made to the American Physical Society's Minority Scholarship.[4]
^Central State University, Department of Mathematics (1972). Modern elementary algebra workbook. Dubuque: W.C. Brown Book Co. Retrieved April 18, 2017.
