Margaret Learned Chapin was born on March 31, 1904 in New London, Connecticut. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1925. After graduation she began teaching at the high school in Unionville, Connecticut where she remained until 1930, when she became a mathematics teacher at Northfield Seminary in East Northfield, Massachusetts. Margaret Learned Chapin died on April 8, 1961, in Norwich, Connecticut.