It was there that she met her husband, Isaac, a mathematician of Japanese and French descent who grew up in Japan. They were married in 1957.
Namioka began her career as an mathematics instructor, first at Wells College and then Cornell. While math was an important part of her life, Namioka wrote in Something about the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS), it also held a stigma. When she began attending school in America she learned "girls weren't supposed to be good in math. When I got good grades in math, I found out the other kids thought I was weird." These feelings of being an outsider would become a lifetime challenge and ultimately influenced many of her books.
Namioka explained that her preoccupation with outsiders may have sprung from her childhood. Both of her parents came from families of officials in China, and it was the policy of the government to move their officials around constantly to lessen the likelihood that they might accept favors from local factions and lose their impartiality. "My parents continued their roving lives after they got married," Namioka wrote in SAAS.
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