Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, born in Ohio in 1914, entered the Sisters of Charity in 1932 and professed her vows in 1940. She went on to study at DePaul University, where she received a B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Mathematics and Physics.
In 1965, Sister Mary received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin. Her dissertation work involved constructing algorithms that performed analytic differentiation on algebraic expression, written in CDC FORTRAN 63.