J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr.
Physicist, Mathematician, Engineer
Jesse Ernest Wilkins, Jr. was born on November 27, 1923 in Chicago, IL. Wilkins was an African American nuclear scientist, engineer, and mathematician, who gained first fame on entering the University of Chicago at age 13, becoming its youngest-ever student. His intelligence led to him being referred to as a “negro genius” in the media. In 1940 Wilkins completed his B.Sc. in mathematics at age 17, then his M.Sc. at age 18, and finally went on to complete a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1942 at age 19. In order to improve his rapport with the nuclear engineers reporting to him, Wilkins later received both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from New York University in 1957 and 1960, thus earning five science degrees during his life. He served as an Instructor of Mathematics at the Tuskegee Institute from 1943 to 1944. Wilkins was Associate Physicist to Physicist on the Manhattan Project from 1944 to 1946. J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr. primary achievement has been the development of radiation shielding against gamma radiation, emitted during electron decay of the Sun and other nuclear sources. He developed mathematical models by which the amount of gamma radiation absorbs.
Wilkins had two children with his first wife Gloria Louise Steward (d.1980) whom he married in June 1947, married Maxine G. Malone in 1984. He was married a third time to Vera Wood Anderson in Chicago in September 2003. He had a daughter, Sharon, and a son, J. Ernest III, during his first marriage.
His father, J. Ernest Wilkins Sr., served as US Assistant Secretary of Labor during the Eisenhower administration.
Wilkins is the uncle of two notable attorneys: David B. Wilkins, a professor at the Harvard Law School, and Timothy A. Wilkins, a partner with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. In 2010 a niece of Wilkins, Carolyn Marie Wilkins, Professor of Music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Wilkins died on May 1, 2011, in Fountain Hills, Arizona. He was buried at the National Memorial Cemetery, Cave Creek, Arizona, on May 5.
Wilkins’s memberships included:
- Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity 1938
- National Academy of Engineering, Member, elected in 1976;
- American Society of Mechanical Engineers;
- American Nuclear Society, Board of Directors, 1967–77, President, 1974–75;
- National Research Council of the United States, Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, Chairman, 1990–94;
- Oak Ridge Associated Universities, council, 1990;
- U.S. Army Science Board, chairman, 1970–2001
Honors
- The Wilkins effect, plus the Wigner–Wilkins and Wilkins spectra, discovered during the 1940s, are named or co-named after him
- In March 2007 Wilkins was honored by his alma mater, the University of Chicago, in a special ceremony that included the dedication of his portrait and a plaque in the Eckhart Hall Tea Room of its Physical Sciences Division
- U.S. Army Outstanding Civilian Service Medal, 1980
- NAM, Honorary Life Member, Lifetime Achievement Award, 1994
- QEM Network, Giant in Science Award, 1994
- Department of Energy, Special Recognition Award, 1996
- University of Chicago Alumni Association, Professional Achievement Citation, 1997.
Writing and works published
- with Robert L. Hellens and Paul E. Zweifel, “Status of Experimental and Theoretical Information on Neutron Slowing-Down Distributions in Hydrogenous Media,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, United Nations, 1956;
- “The Landau Constants,” in Progress in Approximation Theory, Nevai, Paul and Allan Pinkus, eds., Academic Press, 1991;
- with E. P. Wigner, Effect of the Temperature of the Moderator on the Velocity Distribution of Neutrons With Numerical Calculations for H as a Moderator, in The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner, Springer-Verlag, 1992;
- “Mean Number of Real Zeroes of a Random Trigonometric Polynomial. II,” in Topics in Polynomials of One or Several Variables and Their Applications, World Scientific Publishing, 1993.
- “Optimization of Extended Surfaces for Heat Transfer”, video recording, American Mathematical Society, 1994.
Periodicals
- with Herbert Goldstein and L. Volume Spencer, Systematic Calculations of Gamma-Ray Penetration, Physical Review, 1953;
- “The Silverman Necessary Condition for Multiple Integrals in the Calculus of Variations”, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1974;
- “A Variational Problem in Hilbert Space, ” Applied Mathematics and Optimization, 1975–76;
- with Keshav N. Srivastava, “Minimum Critical Mass Nuclear Reactors, Part I and Part II”, Nuclear Science and Engineering, 1982;
- with J. N. Kibe, “Apodization for Maximum Central Irradiance and Specified Large Rayleigh Limit of Resolution II “, Journal of the Optical Society of America A, Optics and Image Science, 1984;
- “A Modulus of Continuity for a Class of Quasismooth Functions”, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1985;
- “An Asymptotic Expansion for the Expected Number of Real Zeros of a Random Polynomial”, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1988;
- “An Integral Inequality”, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1991;
- with Shantay A. Souter “Mean Number of Real Zeros of a Random Trigonometric Polynomial. III”, Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, 1995;
- “The Expected Value of the Number of Real Zeros of a Random Sum of Legendre Polynomials”, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1997;
- “Mean Number of Real Zeros of a Random Trigonometric Polynomial IV”, Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, 1997;
- “Mean Number of Real Zeros of a Random Hyperbolic Polynomial”, International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences, 2000.