Lida Kittrell earned the baccalaureate degree in mathematics from Rice University in 1946 at the age of 18, but her interest in mathematics began much sooner as a member of her junior high mathematics team. Following graduation from Rice, she was employed as a mathematician at the Schlumberger Well Surveying Corporation, and in academic year 1947–48, she taught at Texas State College for Women. When she arrived at the University of Texas for graduate work (masters in mathematics, 1949), she was one of two graduate students. At Texas she met and married (1950) fellow mathematics graduate student John H. Barrett. After he accepted a position at the University of Delaware, she commuted to the University of Pennsylvania to complete the PhD in mathematics. Her dissertation, written under the supervision of John Kline, was on “Regular Curves and Regular Points of Finite Order.”
Following conferral of her doctorate, Barrett taught one year at the University of Connecticut at Waterbury while her husband held a postdoctoral appointment at Yale. She was also a faculty member at the University of Utah and a visiting lecturer at the University of Wisconsin before becoming a part-time associate professor of mathematics at UT in 1961. Her husband John’s full-time appointment to a tenure-track position at UT prevented her, under nepotism policies then in place, from also being a tenure-track appointee. Her husband became head of UT’s Mathematics Department in 1964, and she operated an independent mathematical consulting business, including editorial work for book publishers—primarily calculus texts—and did work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in applied mathematics.
Following her husband’s death in 1969, she accepted a full-time, tenure-track appointment in UT’s Mathematics Department—the third female full professor in the College of Arts and Sciences—and became head of the department in 1973, a position she held until 1980. In 1971–72 Barrett chaired the Chancellor’s Task Force on the Status of Women that led to the creation of the Commission for Women. She served on the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee in 1972–73 and on the Arts and Sciences Committee for Curricular Study and Reform, which developed the College Scholars Program for exceptional students. From 1969 to 1973, she was appointed by the UT system president to serve as the statewide university’s corporate liaison representative for the American Association of University Women (AAUW).
She left UT to serve as associate provost and faculty member at Northern Illinois University and then served as dean of arts and sciences at Mississippi State University. Following retirement as dean emeritus from MSU, she served as a senior associate to the head of the Education Directorate at the National Science Foundation for three years and then served as professor of mathematics at the United States Military Academy at West Point for three years. She was president of the Mathematical Association of America in 1989 and 1990 and was the 2008 recipient of the Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics. In 1997 she received the Notable Woman award from UT.