Mittal has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, completed in 1972. Her dissertation, Limiting Behaviour of Maxima in Stationary Gaussian Process, was supervised by Don Ylvisaker.[3] In 1986, she became the first female program director for probability theory at the National Science Foundation, in the same year that Nancy Flournoy became its first female program director for statistics.[4] She was named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1988, "for outstanding and noteworthy contributions to probability theory and its applications, for work in extreme value theory, and for dedicated and conscientious service to the profession and to the IMS".[5] In her retirement from Arizona, she has become an avid origami folder.[6]
Stuetzle, Werner; Mittal, Yashaswini (1979), "Some comments on the asymptotic behavior of robust smoothers", in Gasser, Th.; Rosenblatt, M. (eds.), Smoothing Techniques for Curve Estimation, Proceedings of a Workshop held in Heidelberg, April 2–4, 1979, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol. 757, Berlin: Springer, pp. 191–195, doi:10.1007/BFb0098497, ISBN3-540-09706-6, MR0564259
Mittal, Yashaswini (1991), "Homogeneity of subpopulations and Simpson's paradox", Journal of the American Statistical Association, 86 (413): 167–172, doi:10.2307/2289727, JSTOR2289727
^"Paper Chase"(PDF), What we do when we aren't doing math!, Mathematics, University of Arizona College of Science, p. 15, Winter 2009, archived from the original(PDF) on 2015-09-19