Early Life and Education
She was born Kathleen Rita McNulty in the small village of Creeslough in the Gaeltacht area (Irish-speaking region) of County Donegal, Ireland in 1921 during the Irish War of Independence. On the night of her birth, her father, James, who was an Irish Republican Army training officer, was arrested and imprisoned in Derry Gaol for 2 years. On his release, the family emigrated to the United States in October 1924 and settled in Pennsylvania where James McNulty established a successful stonemasonry business. At the time, Kathleen was unable to speak any English, only Gaelic; she would remember prayers in Gaelic for the rest of her life.
After attending parochial grade school in Chestnut Hill and Hallahan Catholic Girls High School in Philadelphia, she graduated with a degree in mathematics from Chestnut Hill College for Women in June 1942 (the attack on Pearl Harbor had shaken her senior year). Out of a class of 92 women, Kathleen was one of 3 math majors to graduate that year, and all of them had taken every mathematics course offered: two semesters of algebra, the history of math, integral calculus, spherical trigonometry, differential calculus, projective geometry, partial differential equations, and statistics. (In high school she had taken a year of algebra, a year of plane geometry, a second year of algebra, and a year of trigonometry and solid geometry.)
During her third year of college, Kathleen began the job hunt, knowing that she wanted to work in mathematics but did not want to be a schoolteacher. She learned that insurance companies' actuarial positions required a master's degree and were seldom filled by women anyway. Feeling that business training would make her more employable, she took as many business courses as her college schedule would permit: accounting, money and banking, business law, economics, and statistics.
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