After graduating from her Venezuelan high school at age 16, she studied architecture at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) beginning in 1959. With the assistance of Alan Perlis, she shifted fields to mathematics in 1960. She married Manuel Blum, then a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and transferred in 1961 to Simmons College, a private women's liberal arts college in Boston. Simmons did not have a strong mathematics program but she was eventually able to take Isadore Singer's mathematics classes at MIT, graduating from Simmons with a B.S. in mathematics in 1963.