Her mother, Katherine Riedelbauch Baker, was a music teacher and chamber musician.
She continued on as a graduate student, working with her father in mathematics and completing a master's degree in 1925.
[1] Her dissertation, A Contribution to the Waring Problem for Cubic Functions, concerned a variation of Waring's problem in number theory, on representing integers as sums of the values of a cubic polynomial;[2] it was supervised by Leonard Eugene Dickson.
[3][4] Baker's career at Vassar College began in early 1935, when she took a position as instructor there.
In late 1935 she moved to Mount Holyoke College as an assistant professor.