[1][2] Mary Kenny was born on February 5, 1905, in Fall River, Massachusetts, one of six children of an Anglo-Irish mailman.
After graduating in 1926, she became an Anne Crosby Emery fellow at Brown and earned a master's degree in mathematics there in 1927.
Her dissertation, The Hamilton-Jacobi Theory for the Problems of Bolza and Mayer, was jointly supervised by Gilbert Ames Bliss and Magnus Hestenes;[4] it concerned the calculus of variations.
[3] In 1932, she married Aubrey Wilfred Landers Jr., a fellow mathematics student at Brown who had also taken a position at Hunter College.
[2] She also served as secretary of the Legislative Conference of the City University of New York academic staff from 1959 until its 1972 merger with the United Federation of College Teachers.