Carolyn Ray Boone Mahoney (born 1946) is an American mathematician who served as president of Lincoln University of Missouri.
[2] Carolyn Mahoney was born the sixth of thirteen children in 1946 in Memphis, Tennessee, to Stephen and Myrtle Boone.
As a teenager, Mahoney's parents separated due to her father's drinking and gambling and the family was forced to move to a lower-class neighborhood.
[1] In 1994 and 1995, Mahoney served as a program director at the National Science Foundation, and she later worked as an administrator at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina.
As well as her thesis work on matroids, she has also published research on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem concerning the chromatic number of unit distance graphs.