Michler was the daughter of German mathematician Gerhard O. Michler [de] and was born in Ithaca, New York while her family was visiting Cornell University from Germany.^[1] She grew up in Germany, living in Tübingen, Giessen, and Essen.^[2] She completed her undergraduate studies in 1988 at the University of Oxford, graduating summa cum laude.^[3][6]

Michler earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1993 from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation is titled "Hodge components of cyclic homology of affine hypersurfaces."^[5][7] Her advisors were Mariusz Wodzicki and Arthur Ogus. She spent the academic year 1993-1994 as a postdoc at Queen's University working with Leslie Roberts. In 1994, she joined the tenure-track faculty at the University of North Texas where she earned tenure in 2000. She was the author of eleven (11) research articles in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry.^[8][9] She organized several special sessions at meetings of the American Mathematical Society.^[10][11][12] The session in San Antonio resulted in a conference proceedings which Michler co-edited.^[13] In 2000 she was awarded a National Science Foundation POWRE grant to visit Northeastern University.^[14]

Michler was killed in an accident in Boston on November 1, 2000, when she was struck by a construction vehicle while riding her bicycle.^[4][15][6] Several conferences were organized in her honor.^[16][17] Two conferences resulted in a volume of papers dedicated to her memory^[18][19] which includes a dedicatory article^[20] and an article describing her research.^[21] In 2007 the Association for Women in Mathematics inaugurated the Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize which is "awarded annually to a woman recently promoted to Associate Professor or an equivalent position in the mathematical sciences".^[22]