Mary Cartwright | |
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 Cartwright in 1950 | |
| Born | (1900-12-17)17 December 1900 Aynho, England |
| Died | 3 April 1998(1998-04-03) (aged 97) Cambridge, England |
| Alma mater | St Hugh's College, Oxford |
| Known for |
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| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Doctoral advisor | G. H. Hardy |
| Doctoral students | |
| Other notable students | Sheila Scott Macintyre |
Dame Mary Lucy CartwrightDBE FRS FRSE (17 December 1900 – 3 April 1998)[1] was a British mathematician. She was one of the pioneers of what would later become known aschaos theory.[2] Along withJ. E. Littlewood, Cartwright saw many solutions to a problem which would later be seen as an example of thebutterfly effect.
Mary Cartwright was born on 17 December 1900, inAynho, Northamptonshire, where her father William Digby wasvicar. Through her grandmother Jane Holbech, she descended from poetJohn Donne andWilliam Mompesson, Vicar of Eyam.[3][4] She had four siblings, two older and two younger: John (born 1896), Nigel (born 1898), Jane (born 1905), and William (born 1907).[5] Her early education was at Leamington High School (1912–1915), and then at Gravely Manor School inBoscombe (1915–1916) before completion inGodolphin School in Salisbury (1916–1919).[6]
Cartwright studied mathematics atSt Hugh's College, Oxford, graduating in 1923 with a first class degree. She was the first woman to attain the final degree lectures and to obtain a first. She briefly taught atAlice Ottley School inWorcester andWycombe Abbey School in Buckinghamshire before returning to Oxford in 1928 to read for herD.Phil. Cartwright was supervised byG. H. Hardy in her doctoral studies. During the academic year 1928–9 Hardy was atPrinceton, so it wasE. C. Titchmarsh who took over the duties as a supervisor. Her thesis "The Zeros of Integral Functions of Special Types" was examined byJ. E. Littlewood, whom she met for the first time as an external examiner in her oral examination for that 1930 D.Phil.[4]
In 1930, Cartwright was awarded aYarrow Research Fellowship and went toGirton College,Cambridge to continue working on the topic of her doctoral thesis. Attending Littlewood's lectures, she solved one of the open problems which he posed. Her mathematical theorem, now known asCartwright's theorem, gives an estimate for the maximum modulus of ananalytic function that takes the same value no more thanp times in theunit disc. To prove the theorem she used a new approach, applying a technique introduced byLars Ahlfors forconformal mappings.[7][8] While at Cambridge Cartwright attended the mathematical lectures ofLudwig Wittgenstein.[9]
Throughout her career, Cartwright wrote over ninety articles on several different mathematical concepts. Her contributions extended to topics such as the Dirichlet series, Abel summation, directions of Borel spreads, analytic functions regular on the unit disk, the zeros of integral functions, maximum and minimum moduli, and functions of finite order in an angle.[8]
In 1936, Cartwright became director of studies in mathematics at Girton College. In 1938, she began work on a new project which had a major impact on the direction of her research. The Radio Research Board of theDepartment of Scientific and Industrial Research produced a memorandum regardingcertain differential equations which came out of modelling radio and radar work.[10] They asked theLondon Mathematical Society if they could help find a mathematician who could work on these problems and she became interested. The dynamics lying behind the problems were unfamiliar to Cartwright, so she approached Littlewood for help with this aspect. They began to collaborate studying the equations, in particular theVan der Pol oscillator, which greatly surprised the two:
For something to do we went on and on at the thing with no earthly prospect of "results"; suddenly the whole vista of the dramatic fine structure of solutions stared us in the face.[11]
The fine structure described here is today seen to be a typical instance of thebutterfly effect. The collaboration led to important results which have greatly influenced the direction that the modern theory ofdynamical systems has taken.[12][13] Although the duo did not supply the answer in time, they succeeded in directing the engineers' attention away from faulty equipment towards practical ways of compensating for the electrical "noise"—or erratic fluctuations—being produced.[10]
In 1945, Cartwright simplifiedHermite'selementary proof of the irrationality ofπ. She set her version of the proof as aTripos question, later published in an appendix to SirHarold Jeffreys' bookScientific Inference.[14] In 1947, she was elected to be aFellow of the Royal Society;[15] although she was not the first woman to be elected to that Society, she was the first female mathematician.[12][13]
Cartwright was appointed Mistress of Girton in 1948 and a Reader in the Theory of Functions in Cambridge in 1959 until 1968.[4] From 1957 to 1960, she was president of the Cambridge Association of University Women.[16] After retiring from Girton, she was a visiting professor atBrown University from 1968 to 1969 and atClaremont Graduate School from 1969 to 1970.[16] Cartwright died in Cambridge, on 3 April 1998 at the age of 97.[8]
Cartwright was the first woman:
In 1968, Cartwright became the first woman to receive theDe Morgan Medal, the highest award of theLondon Mathematical Society,[18][19] and was elected an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh (HonFRSE).[20] In 1969, she received the distinction of being honoured by the Queen, becoming Dame Mary Cartwright,Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Cartwright died in Midfield Lodge Nursing Home inCambridge in 1998.[6]
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| Preceded by | Mistress ofGirton College, Cambridge 1949–1968 | Succeeded by |
