Dolores Margaret Richard Spikes (August 24, 1936 – June 1, 2015) was an American mathematician and university administrator.
[2] Spikes continued her education at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana where she earned a master of science degree in mathematics and then returned in 1958 to Louisiana where she married Spikes and began teaching high school science in Mossville, a small, mostly black community near Lake Charles.
In December, 1971 (with a dissertation titled "Semi-Valuations and Groups of Divisibility") Dolores Spikes earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Louisiana State University.
[3] The website "Black Women in Mathematics" affirms that Spikes was the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. from Louisiana State; that website also offers a number of anecdotes that help to portray Spikes as a human being as well as an academic.
[4] She died in 2015 and was funeralized at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Baton Rouge.