Barbara Oakley is something of a wonder—almost as impressive, although in a very different way, as her namesake Annie, the sharpshooter.
From high school Ms. Oakley went into the U.S. Army, who turned her into a fluent Russian-speaker—her first degree was in Slavic languages. Leaving the Army with the rank of captain, and seeing few civilian job opportunities in translating or interpreting, she retrained herself in math and science, subjects she had failed in high school. She tells us that “I…only started studying trigonometry—remedial trigonometry—when I was twenty-six years old.”1 The retraining was so successful Oakley is now associate professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan. Along the way she somehow found time for curious and unusual adventures. She and her spouse first met in Antarctica, for example; not a thing many couples can claim.
Oakley is now
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