Burke Hubbard is the daughter of Los Angeles Times reporter Vincent J. Burke, and spent a year in high school living in Moscow when Burke was stationed there in 1964.^[2][3] She was an undergraduate at Harvard University, initially majoring in biology but switching to English,^[2] and graduating in 1969.^[4] She became a science writer for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a journalist for The Ithaca Journal,^[2] and was the 1981 winner of the AAAS Westinghouse Science Journalism Award in the small newspaper category, for her articles on acid rain in The Ithaca Journal.^[5]

She married mathematician John H. Hubbard, with whom she has four children, and with her family has split her time between Ithaca, New York, and Marseille, France, with shorter-term stays elsewhere.^[2]

Burke Hubbard is the author of a popular mathematics book on wavelet transforms, originally published in French as Ondes et ondelettes: la saga d’un outil mathématique (Pour la Science, 1995). It won the Prix d'Alembert [fr] of the Société mathématique de France,^[4][6] and Hubbard became the first winner of this prize who was not French.^[4] The English edition of the same book, The world according to wavelets: the story of a mathematical technique in the making, was published in 1996 by A K Peters, with a second edition in 1998. It was also translated into German by M. Basler as Wavelets: Die Mathematik der kleinen Wellen (Birkhäuser, 1997).^[7] With her husband, she wrote a textbook on multivariate calculus, Vector calculus, linear algebra, and differential forms: A unified approach (Prentice Hall, 1999; 5th ed., 2015).^[8] She has also translated the book Biochronological correlations by Jean Guex from French into English.^[9]

In 2001, Burke Hubbard founded the mathematics book publisher Matrix Editions.^[2]