Smith grew up in the town of Nykøbing Mors, Denmark. In 1903, she graduated from the University of Copenhagen with a degree in mathematics and physics. After, she worked as secretary to astronomer and statistician Thorvald Thiele^[1] and later with the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea for which she authored several volumes on fish populations.^[2]

In 1916, Smith was admitted for doctoral training at the University of London where Karl Pearson had founded the first university statistics department. She was a student of Pearson who described her as “brilliant” in a letter to Ronald Fisher.^[3] At London, she produced an influential paper in the journal Biometrika on minimum chi-squared estimation of the correlation coefficient.^[3] Disagreements about aspects of her work led to increased friction between Pearson and Fisher.^[3]

In her dissertation, which was published in 1918 (see below), she invented optimal design where she computed G-optimal designs for polynomial regression of order up to 6.^[3] After finishing her doctorate she moved to Copenhagen, where she worked as a researcher for the Commission for Ocean Research 1918 to 1924 and with Johannes Schmidt at the Carlsberg Laboratory from 1920 to 1921.^[1] She eventually left research after obtaining her teaching credentials to become a high school teacher.^[2]

• Smith, K. (1916). On the ‘best’ values of the constants in frequency distributions. Biometrika, 11(3), 262–276.
• Smith, K. (1918). On the standard deviations of adjusted and interpolated values of an observed polynomial function and its constants and the guidance they give towards a proper choice of the distribution of observations. Biometrika, 12(1/2), 1–85.
• Smith, K. (1922).The standard deviations of fraternal and parental correlation coefficients. Biometrika, 14(1/2), 1–22.