Pierce was
home-schooled in
Fallbrook, California and began playing the
violin at age four. By age 11 she began performing professionally as a violinist. As a teenager, she also started taking classes at a local
community college, accumulating so many units that some of the universities she applied to refused to consider her for freshman admission. She entered
Princeton University majoring in mathematics but intending to pursue an
MD–PhD program; under the influence of faculty mentor and undergraduate thesis supervisor
Elias M. Stein, her interests shifted towards pure mathematics. As an undergraduate, she also became an intern at the
National Security Agency. She was Princeton's 2002
valedictorian and became a
Rhodes Scholar, repeating two accomplishments of her brother
Niles Pierce from nine years earlier. She earned a master's degree at the
University of Oxford in 2004. Returning to Princeton for doctoral study in mathematics, she completed her Ph.D. in 2009. Her dissertation,
Discrete Analogues in Harmonic Analysis, was supervised by Stein. ==Career==