Mary Graustein (April 12, 1884 – July 18, 1972) was a mathematician and university professor, and was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics (1917) at Radcliffe College.

[2] As was common practice at that time, Mary Curtis took a teaching position at Leominster High School in Westminster, where she taught German, algebra and geometry for two years, traveling to Europe for the summer of 1907.

According to mathematician Judy Green:[2]In a November 1920 letter extracted in the Bulletin of the AMS, the Italian geometer and historian of mathematics Gino Loria wrote to the American historian of mathematics D. E. Smith that 'Mary F. Curtis had established [a] remarkable result, that every rectifiable skew parabola is a helix” (27 (1921): 201).

[2]It was in Wellesley, on June 10, 1921, at the age of 37, that she married another mathematician William Caspar Graustein (1888-1941), who was born in Cambridge and teaching at Harvard when he met Curtis, one of his students.

[2] After their marriage and her subsequent name change, Mary Graustein took an academic leave of absence for two years before returning to teach at Wellesley College as assistant professor.

Three of them are Seniors; they and their theses on ‘Infinite Series,’ ‘Curve Fitting’ and ‘The Number System of Algebra’ do their bit to keep me busy.

[2] Her husband, William Graustein, an assistant dean at Harvard, died tragically in an automobile accident on January 22, 1941 at the age of 52.