A native of Lewisburg, West Virginia, Mary Lindquist's career has covered everything from classroom teaching to international leadership.
As NCTM president from 1992 to 1994, she presided over the early years of the NCTM Standards and helped launch discussions of when and how NCTM would update these documents. At the time of this writing she is chair of NCTM's Commission on the Future of the Standards, the body that has overseen the process of developing NCTM's updated Standards document,
Principles and Standards for School Mathematics.
Lindquist began her career as a seventh-grade mathematics teacher, and currently she is the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Mathematics Education at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. During her career, she has been involved in many aspects of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, including the interpretative reports for NCTM. Of the resulting NCTM monograph, one nominator wrote, "This is one of the most often quoted sources on student performance in mathematics across the early 1990s." Lindquist also served on the U.S. Steering Committee for the Third International Mathematics and Science Study and cowrote an elementary school mathematics textbook.