Audrey Terras was born September 10, 1942, in
Washington, D.C. She received a
BS degree in mathematics from the
University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) in 1964, and
MA and
PhD degrees from
Yale University in 1966 and 1970 respectively. She was married to fellow UMD alumnus
Riho Terras. She stated in a 2008 interview that she chose to study mathematics because "The U.S. government paid me! And not much! It was the time of Sputnik, so we needed to produce more mathematicians, and when I was deciding between Math and History, they weren’t paying me to do history, they were paying me to do math." ==Career==