Annie Marie Garraway (née Watkins; born 1940) is an American mathematician who worked in telecommunications and electronic data transmission.
Annie Marie attended Booker T. Washington High School[3] and then enrolled in S. A. Owen Junior College, which her father had founded and served as the first president.
[2] As a freshman in 1957, she intended to major in engineering, but a math teacher at Owen, Juanita R. Turner, suggested that Annie Marie consider a different course of study.
[5][6] According to one of her brothers, "Her pioneering mathematical algorithms and inventions for Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies paved the way for the modern era of telecommunications and the electronic transmission of data around the world.
"[9][10] In 2019, Garraway created a scholarship at Johns Hopkins, also in memory of her brother, Levi Watkins Jr. who was the first African American to become the university's chief resident in cardiac surgery.
[5] Garraway's 2020 gift to LeMoyne-Owen college was inspired by the movie and book, Hidden Figures, which describes the true story of three African-American female mathematicians working at NASA as human computers, who played a critical role in the 1960s U.S. space efforts.
Little is known of Turner except that when she was attending Grant Elementary School, she was the youngest winner of the citywide spelling contest (for African-American students) in 1927.