Her death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a professor emerita. Her son, Jeffrey Keller, confirmed her death but did not cite a cause.

Beginning in the 1950s, when relatively few women entered scientific professions and those who did faced pervasive sexism, Dr. Keller distinguished herself in a range of specialties, from theoretical physics to biology and genetics.

But she was perhaps best known for her application of feminist theory to science — a field, she argued, that had wrongly excluded not only women themselves, but also modes of thinking that were traditionally regarded as feminine. She did not call for a “feminist science” but rather a “gender-free science,” one that she suggested would be fairer to practitioners and more productive in its results.

Dr. Keller explored her ideas in books including “Reflections on Gender and Science” (1985) and “A Feeling for the Organism,” a biography of Barbara McClintock, an American geneticist who received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1983, shortly after the book was published.

Taken together, Dr. Keller’s work sought to upend science as it was known. For centuries, objectivity, as exemplified by the rigors of the scientific method, had been the bedrock of all inquiry. And for centuries, objectivity was regarded as a typically male virtue, with subjective traits such as intuition and emotion associated with women.

Aside from the speciousness of those stereotypes, Dr. Keller argued, science could benefit from the application of intuition and feeling in experimentation and exploration. Laboratories may be sterile, but the scientific process is not, and many flashes of brilliance might just as fairly be described as flashes of intuition.

“There is no magic lens that will enable us to look at, to see nature unclouded,” Dr. Keller once observed, “uncolored by any values, hopes, fears, anxieties, desires, goals that we bring to it.”

She exposed examples of gendered thinking throughout science: for example, the notion that nature is a “she,” or the popular image in human sexuality of the sperm breaching the egg much in the way that a man might conquer a woman.

She demonstrated that “what we think of as rational, objective science actually reflects men’s ways of approaching knowledge,” Deborah Tannen, a best-selling linguist known for her exploration of differences between men and women, once wrote about Dr. Keller’s book “Reflections on Gender and Science.”

“In an example I particularly relish,” Tannen noted, Dr. Keller “writes that biologists failed to identify the way that slime mold changes from single-cell organisms to multicellular aggregates because they stubbornly sought a nonexistent, boss-like ‘pacemaker’ cell that orders the others to combine.”

In 1992, Dr. Keller received a MacArthur fellowship, popularly known as a “genius” grant, for her work.

“My argument was that feeling and reason are both human traits,” she later told the New York Times. “Why parse them according to the genders? Why exclude feelings from science and reason from women’s domain? My whole effort was to erase those dichotomies.”

Evelyn Fox was born in Queens on March 20, 1936. Her father, who ran a delicatessen, and her mother, a homemaker, were both Jewish immigrants from Belarus.

Dr. Keller and her two siblings grew up with little in the way of material comforts but were all encouraged in their education. Her brother, Maurice Fox, became a biologist at MIT, and her sister, Frances Fox Piven, became a prominent social scientist and activist.

Dr. Keller enrolled at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., where she received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1957.

“I fell in love … with a discipline of pure, precise, definitive thought, and with what I conceived of as its ambitions,” she once wrote. “I fell in love with the life of the mind. I also fell in love, I might add, with the image of myself striving and succeeding in an area where women had rarely ventured. It was a heady experience.”

Dr. Keller then moved to Harvard University, where she received a master’s degree in 1959 and a PhD in 1963 — both in physics — while enduring what she described as an intensely misogynistic environment.

“I was leered at by some, invited now and then to a faculty party by others,” she recalled. “The open and unbelievably rude laughter with which I was often received at such events was only one of the many indications that I was on display — for purposes I could either not perceive or not believe.”

She later branched into the interdisciplinary field of mathematical biology.

Dr. Keller taught over the years at institutions including New York University, the State University of New York at Purchase, Northeastern University in Boston and the University of California at Berkeley in addition to MIT, where she worked for the Program in Science, Technology and Society.

Dr. Keller’s marriage to Joseph B. Keller ended in divorce. Besides her son, of Somerville, Mass., survivors include a daughter, Sarah Keller of Billings, Mont.; her sister; and two grandchildren.

Dr. Keller’s books included “Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science” (1992), “Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology” (1995), “The Century of the Gene” (2000), “Making Sense of Life” (2002) and “The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture” (2010).

He memoir, “Making Sense of My Life in Science,” was published this year.

“I want to create the conditions for a wider diversity of science,” Dr. Keller told the Boston Globe in 1986, explaining her work. “I think it will be good for everybody. Scientists should be out there doing what they do best under the conditions of least constraint. Some should be fighting to release the constraints and some should be doing the work.”