Mary Elizabeth Kramer was born on August 6, 1948 in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. From 1965 to 1969, she was educated at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, majoring in mathematics, philosophy and history, and graduating summa cum laude in 1969. She then attended Harvard University as a mathematics graduate student: she completed her Master of Arts degree in 1971 and her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1972. Her doctoral thesis was titled "Non-singular deformations of space curves, using determinantal schemes": her advisors were David Mumford and Heisuke Hironaka. She was brought up a Christian. She became interested in Judaism, and formally converted to Conservative Judaism in college. In 1968, she married David Schaps, a classics professor who was then also studying for a PhD at Harvard. They both gradually felt more and more drawn to Orthodox Judaism and considered themselves ultra-Orthodox by the time they had completed their doctorates. The couple made aliyah in 1972. Together, she and her husband had two children: this was a small family by Haredi standards, and they raised four more foster children. They live in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox city near Tel Aviv.
Career
Schaps had some teaching experience at Harvard University: she was teaching assistant from 1971 to 1972, and a lecturer at the 1975Harvard Summer School. In 1972, having moved to Israel, she was appointed a lecturer in mathematics at Tel Aviv University. In her second year in Israel the Yom Kippur War occurred: the change in language, culture and the threat to her new family were a shock. In 1977, she moved to Bar-Ilan University as a senior lecturer: she was promoted to associate professor in 1991 and full professor in 2006. She was the only female ultra-Orthodox professor in Israel. In October 2013, she was appointed Dean of Exact Sciences at Bar-Ilan University: having been the only female Haredi professor, she now became the highest ranking Haredi woman in Israeli academia. She stepped down as dean in 2015, and was made Professor Emeritus on retirement in 2016.
Schaps, Mary. Deformations of Cohen–Macaulay schemes of codimension 2 and non-singular deformations of space curves. Amer. J. Math. 99, no. 4, 669–685.
Schaps, Mary; Zakay-Illouz, Evelyne. Combinatorial partial tilting complexes for the Brauer star algebras. Representations of algebras, 187–207, Lecture Notes in Pure and Appl. Math., 224, Dekker, New York, 2002.
