[3] At the International Mathematical Congress held at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, she met Felix Klein, who urged her to study at the University of Göttingen.

With financial assistance from Christine Ladd-Franklin, she arrived in Germany at the same time as two other American students, Margaret Maltby and Grace Chisholm.

She graduated magna cum laude and was awarded her PhD upon the publication of her dissertation, "Über den Hermite'schen Fall der Lamé'schen Differentialgleichungen" (On the Hermitian case of the Lamé differential equations), in the summer of 1896 and was examined in July 1896.

She published only one further article, the first English translation of the 1900 lecture by David Hilbert presenting the first ten of his famous problems, issued in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.

Henry B. Newson (1860–1910) was head of the mathematics department at the University of Kansas and had published the book Continuous groups of projective transformations treated synthetically (1895).

After his marriage he published the books: Graphic Algebra for Secondary Schools (1905); The five types of projective transformations of the plane (1895); and Theory of collineations (1911).

All of the signers left Washburn within a year or two, including Newson, who became department head at Eureka College in her native Illinois until her retirement in 1942.

After she finished teaching at Eureka College, Newson moved to Lake Dalecarlia in Lowell, Indiana.

In 1956, when she was 87 years old, she moved into a nursing home in Poolesville, Maryland, where she was close to her daughter Caroline Beshers.