[1] Despite being raised on a farm, she and her siblings all pursued higher education; they all attended college, five had master's degrees, and five, including Mary, earned PhDs.
[2] In 1915, while still working on her dissertation, she moved to Baltimore where she taught at the Roland Park Country School and took graduate classes from Frank Morley at Johns Hopkins University.
Prior to Haseman's investigations, the Scottish mathematician and physicist Peter Guthrie Tait had found all prime achiral knots with 10 or fewer crossings.
Her work during this period lead to her PhD thesis, "On knots with a census of the amphicheirals with twelve crossings," and two articles published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, one in 1918[13] and one in 1920.
Haseman's work marked the end of the exploratory, intuition-based phase of knot theory began by Peter Gutrie Tait.
Also, by the time of Haseman's thesis, other mathematicians were beginning to apply the new, more technical topological tools to the study of knots.