[2] She was a brilliant student and won the department's James D. Crump Prize in mathematics in her junior year.
[2] At University of Chicago, Alice was a student of Ernest Preston Lane, author of Metric Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces (1940) and A Treatise on Projective Differential Geometry (1942).
[4] Alice continued her investigations into curves near an undulation point, publishing in American Journal of Mathematics in 1948.
Her husband Richard was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,[3] researching non-associative algebras.
As a teacher, Alice especially reached out to students who had difficulties with or were afraid of mathematics, by designing special classes for them.
She took a special interest in helping high-school students, women in particular, achieve in mathematics.
"[7] Schafer was named Helen Day Gould Professor of Mathematics at Wellesley in 1980.