Cordero was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Her mother, whose schooling stopped after the fifth grade,[5] made education a top priority in the family home. She told her children "the best thing I can give you is an education." Cordero and her siblings would do their homework together and discussed what they learned in school each day.[5] Cordero said, "We learned each other's subjects." Wanting to go to college, Cordero bought herself a college exam preparation book in high school and studied for the college-entrance exam.[5][6] She states that her exam scores were the highest scores for her high school, Miguel Melendez Munoz High School.[6]
Cordero attended the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras and received her B.S. in Mathematics in 1981. She was granted a National Science Foundation Minority Graduate Fellowship which she used to attend the University of California at Berkeley to obtain her masters in mathematics in 1983. She continued her studies at the University of Iowa, and obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1989 under Norman Johnson.[7][6]
Career and research
Cordero's research is in the area of finite semifields (non-associative algebras) and their associated planes (viewed affinely or projectively) in the general area of finite geometry.[8]
Cordero's most-cited work is A survey of finite semifields.[11] She was the Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation grant of $2.85 million awarded to the University of Texas at Arlington in 2009 for a project that placed mathematics graduate students in Arlington public schools to enhance teaching and learning in the classrooms and to inspire students to pursue careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).[12]
