[8]: 1488 After travelling to Göttingen to absorb some mathematical culture, Reid decided instead to write a full-length biography of David Hilbert, who she considered the greatest mathematician of the first half of the twentieth century.

Her next book, published in 1982, was a biography of the mathematical statistician Jerzy Neyman, who like Courant had emigrated to the United States and built a new career there.

[6]: 279 An attempt to write a biography of Eric Temple Bell proved unexpectedly difficult, as he had been very secretive about his early life.

Reid discovered that Bell, a native of Scotland, as a young man had spent twelve years in the United States but had never revealed this to his wife or his son.

[2]: 354 Her sister Julia gradually became more famous, and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1976 and President of the American Mathematical Society in 1983.