(Ken) Clements have researched the history of mathematics education,[1] in the process discovering school worksheets in the Harvard Library that are among the oldest known writings of Abraham Lincoln.
[3] Ellerton was born in 1942;[4] her father was a schoolteacher in a small school in the Australian Outback.
[1] She completed a Ph.D. in physical and inorganic chemistry in 1966, at the University of Adelaide; her dissertation was The interaction of aminoacridines and aminobenzacridines with DNA.
While at Edith Cowan University, she also served as editor of the Mathematics Education Research Journal.
In 2005, she married Clements, another Australian mathematics educator and long-term collaborator; he moved to Illinois State to join her.