An element is a chemical substance made up of a particular kind of atom and hence cannot be broken down or transformed by a chemical reaction into a different element, though it can be transmuted into another element through a nuclear reaction.
Almost 40 years separate Shirley Ann Jackson's achievement, as the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in theoretical high energy physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jedidah Isler, the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Yale.
1878 The first African American to earn a Ph.D. in Science was Edward Alexander Bouchet (Physics-Yale University) and only the sixth American to possess a Ph.D. in Physics. For the history of African Americans in Physics, see [ A Timeline of African American Physicists ]. 1886 Kelly Miller was the first African American to study graduate mathematics (Johns Hopkins University), the first American University, to offer a program in graduate mathematics.