In 1956, she earned a PhD from New York University with the dissertation Cauchy's Problem for a Partial Differential Equation with Real Multiple Characteristics with thesis adviser Richard Courant.
It was planned, by Professor Lax and others, to make mathematics accessible to the average reader while still being technically accurate.
[5] In 1977, she won the George Pólya Award for her article: Linear Algebra, A Potent Tool, Vol.
Together they got funding from the Ford Foundation to train teachers from these schools in the methods Lax had pioneered at New York University.
[6] Though she was involved with reforming mathematics education for high school and college students in New York, she didn't like panel discussions at conferences, especially when she was meant to reply immediately to preceding remarks by fellow panelists.
She believed her responses were “not ready for public consumption when my turn comes.”[7] An insert from her writing at the Mathematics as a Humanistic Discipline Session stated: "I am convinced that the use of language- reading, writing, listening and speaking is essential part of learning anything, and especially mathematics."
She looked at the mandated syllabi from 6th-8th grade New York middle schools for “integrated math sequences” and she found that because so many topics covered, there was little time for students to connect mathematics outside of the classroom before they were tested.
She taught pre-calculus classes by asking her students to explain the meaning behind exponential functions orally and written accounts of how they solved the problem.