Maya Arad was born in Rishon LeZion in Israel in 1971 and grew up in a kibbutz, Nahal-Oz. At age 11 she returned to her city of birth. Like most Israelis, she served in the Israeli Defense Forces, namely in the Education Corps, where she met her future husband, Reviel Netz, a poet and noted Israeli scholar of the history of pre-modern mathematics, who is currently a professor of Classics and of Philosophy at Stanford University. The couple has two daughters.
