Juan Sanchez
Dr. Bridgette McAden
MAT 110/50
February 27, 2012

William A. Massey – Mathematician

He was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, as the younger of two sons of Richard and Juliette Massey. He is a graduate of the public schools of St. Louis, Missouri and attended high school in University City, a suburb of St. Louis. After receiving a Harvard Book Award and a National Achievement Scholarship at University City High School, he entered Princeton University in 1973. There, he encountered his first real introduction to research mathematics in an honor calculus course taught by the late Ralph Fox. He wrote his undergraduate senior thesis, titled "Galois Connections on Local Fields,'' in algebraic number theory, under the direction of the late Bernard Dwork, and graduated from Princeton in 1977 with an A.B. in Mathematics (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi). That same year he was awarded a Bell Labs Cooperative Research Fellowship for minorities to attend graduate school in the department of mathematics at Stanford University. In 1981, he received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford and his thesis, titled "Non-Stationary Queues,'' was directed by Joseph Keller.
Dr. William Massey's parents, Juliette and Richard Massey Sr. were both educators; she was from Chattanooga, Tennessee and he was from Charlotte, North Carolina. They met at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri which became his birthplace. Professor Massey's initial fascination with numbers started when his mother would let him play with plastic numbers and cut up old calendars.
His family moved to Saint Louis, Missouri when he was four. There he came of age educationally during the post-Sputnik era. His interests in drawing and graphic arts helped him to appreciate the uses of perspective and proportion. It was exciting to discover that only a ruler and compass were needed to draw a regular hexagon. In 7th grade, he was given an exam involving the type of abstract reasoning that he would later see in a high school algebra course.
Not only did he excel on this test, but he also scored well beyond everybody else in the class. This is when he knew that he wanted to become a mathematician. Starting high school in the Saint Louis suburb of University City, he learned about trigonometry, vectors with dot and cross products, as well as single and multi-variable calculus with divergences and curls. This knowledge was supplemented by a growing appreciation of the critical role that mathematical concepts were playing in his chemistry and physics classes.
His true understanding of mathematics as a researcher began as a college student at Princeton University. He specialized in abstract algebra and number theory while mastering real, complex, and functional analysis.
The summers spent as a graduate student at Bell Laboratories exposed Dr. Massey to the world of applied mathematics and gave him his first research publication in 1978. It was here that he developed an interest in “queueing theory”. This is a branch of applied probability that was invented for the design and performance analysis of telephone systems. The resulting mathematics produces theorems, formulas, and algorithmic tools that assist communication engineers and business managers in making strategic, data driven decisions. This interest in the mathematics of communications led him to work full time as a member of technical staff in the Mathematical Sciences Research Center at Bell Laboratories after obtaining his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1981.
Since 1981, Dr. Massey has been a member of technical staff in the Mathematical Sciences Research Center at Bell Laboratories, a division of Lucent Technologies. His research interests include Queueing Theory, Applied Probability, Stochastic Processes, Special Functions, and the Performance Modelling of Telecommunication Systems. He has published 50 papers in areas such as nonstationary queues, stochastic ordering, queueing networks, database theory, and wireless communications. One of his publications made him the co-author of a patent on server staffing.
He was "doubly fortunate" to have worked at Bell Labs. It was the leading center of industrial research in communications. Moreover, Bell Labs during the last three decades of the 20th century had a critical mass of African-American researchers. This created for the minority scientists and engineers working there a sense of purpose and professional accomplishment similar to what the Harlem Renaissance was for African-American artists and poets. Upon leaving the Labs in 2001, he accepted a position at Princeton University as the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering.
Dr. Massey has made many original contributions as a mathematician by developing a theory of “dynamical queueing systems”. Classical queueing models assumed that calling rates were constant so they could use the static, equilibrium analysis of time homogeneous Markov chains. However, real communication systems call for the large scale analysis of queueing models with time-varying rates. His thesis at Stanford University created a dynamic, asymptotic method for time inhomogeneous Markov chains called “uniform acceleration” to deal with such problems. Moreover, his research on queueing networks led to new methods of comparing multi-dimensional, Markov processes by viewing them as “stochastic orderings” on “partially ordered spaces”. Finally, one of his most cited papers develops an algorithm to find a dynamic, optimal server staffing schedule for telephone call centers with time varying demand, which led to a patent. Another highly cited paper creates a temporally and spatially dynamic model for the offered load traffic of wireless communication networks.
Dr. Massey is an internationally known researcher in applied probability and has coauthored papers with colleagues from Canada, France and Israel. He has given invited lectures at the American Mathematical Society (AMS) national conference, the AMS southeastern regional conference, the Congreso Nacional de la Sociedad Matematica Mexicana, the Bouchet Conference for African and African American Physicists and Mathematicians that was held in Ghana as well as conferences held in Canada and Germany. In 1996, he was given NAM's Distinguished Service Award and invited to give the William W. S. Claytor Lecture. He a member of AMS, INFORMS and SIAM and is currently on the Executive Board of the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM). His hobbies include graphic design and photography. His interest in the former has resulted in the creation of the CAARMS logo, the Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (MAD) logo and the redesign of the NAM logo. As a result of his interest in photography, many of his photos of contemporary African American mathematicians have found a home on various webpages throughout the internet.

Bibliography http://charismaallover.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/william-a-massey-a-black-man-who-is-a-mathematician-and-works-at-bell-labs/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Massey_(mathematician)
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/madgreatest.html