Graduated from university in Dresden

In 1928, Maria Reiche graduated from a local university in Dresden, having pursued studies encompassing mathematics, geography, and languages including English and Spanish. Sources documenting this milestone do not specify the precise month and day of her graduation, but the year is well established.

This educational foundation was far from incidental to her later career. The rigorous training in mathematics and geometry she received in Germany equipped her with the analytical tools she would eventually apply to a set of geoglyphs half a world away, on the arid coastal plain of southern Peru. Her facility with languages also enabled her later relocation to South America, where she initially worked as a governess and translator for a German diplomatic family in Cusco before her fateful encounter with the Nazca Lines.

Her academic credentials as a trained mathematician gave her a scientific credibility that would later be crucial when she began to argue, often against skepticism from mainstream archaeologists, that the Nazca Lines were the product of careful, deliberate geometric planning by an ancient civilization, potentially related to astronomical observation. Without this rigorous German university education, it is unlikely Reiche would have developed the systematic surveying and mapping techniques that defined her decades-long fieldwork in Peru.