Lida Barrett


Lida Baker Barrett is a retired American mathematics professor and administrator. She served on many committees and boards and contributed to mathematics, mathematics education, and increasing the participation of members of underrepresented groups in mathematics.

Career

Born in Houston, Texas, she earned her baccalaureate, masters, and doctorate degrees in mathematics from Rice University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. Her 1954 doctoral dissertation, Regular Curves and Regular Points of Finite Order, was supervised by John Robert Kline.
She taught briefly at the Texas State College for Women in Denton.
Barrett served as a mathematics faculty member at the universities of Utah and Tennessee, and headed the mathematics department at the University of Tennessee from 1973-80. She served as an administrator and mathematics faculty member at Northern Illinois University, where she was Associate Provost, and at Mississippi State University, where she was Dean of Arts and Sciences. After retirement as Dean Emerita from MSU, she was a Senior Associate to the head of the Education Directorate at the National Science Foundation for three years and then served as a Professor of Mathematics at the United States Military Academy at West Point for three years.

Notable positions

From 1979-82, Barrett chaired the American Mathematical Society's Committee on Employment and Educational Policy. She was the second woman to become president of the Mathematical Association of America. She was on the planning committee for the International Congress in Mathematics Education in Madrid, Spain, in July 1996. She was a member of the advisory committee of the Harvard Calculus Consortium and of the Adolescence and Young Adult/Mathematics Standards committee for the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards.

Fellowships

She is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and part of the 2019 class of fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics.