Lida Barrett

Lida Baker Kittrell was born on May 21, 1927, in Houston, Texas. She earned her baccalaureate, masters, and doctorate degrees in mathematics from Rice University (1946), the University of Texas at Austin (1949), and the University of Pennsylvania (1954), 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, now Texas Woman's University.

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 to 1980. During her tenure there, she also worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in applied mathematics. She served as an administrator and mathematics faculty member at Northern Illinois University, where she was Associate Provost, and at Mississippi State University (MSU), 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. She died in Knoxville, Tennessee, on January 28, 2021.