Remembered for her biographical portraits of famous mathematicians and for her popular, mathematics-themed nonfiction works, this Missouri-born author served in the early 1980s as President of the American Mathematical Society.
After graduating from San Diego State University in the late 1930s, she studied in the University of California, Berkeley's Education Department and went on to work as an English teacher and freelance journalist.
Shortly after publishing a mathematics article in Scientific American, she wrote a popular math work titled From Zero to Infinity.
She was the sister and sister-in-law of, respectively, mathematicians
In 1993, she published The Search for E.T. Bell, a biography of Scottish-born mathematician Eric Temple Bell.