Mary Cartwright facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Dame Mary Cartwright
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| Born | 17 December 1900 Aynho, Northamptonshire, England, UK
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| Died | 3 April 1998 (aged 97) Cambridge, England, UK
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| Alma mater | St Hugh's College, Oxford |
| Known for | Cartwright's Theorem, Research about the Butterfly effect |
| Awards | FRS DBE De Morgan Medal (1968) Honorary Fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh (HonFRSE) 1968 Sylvester Medal (1964) |
| Scientific career | |
| Doctoral advisor | G. H. Hardy |
| Doctoral students | |
| Other notable students | Sheila Scott Macintyre |
| Influences | J. E. Littlewood |
Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright, DBE, FRS, FRSE (17 December 1900 – 3 April 1998) was a British mathematician. She was one of the pioneers of what would later become known as chaos theory. Along with J. E. Littlewood, Cartwright saw many solutions to a problem which would later be seen as an example of the butterfly effect.
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Early life and education
Mary Cartwright was born on 17 December 1900, in Aynho, Northamptonshire, where her father William Digby was vicar. She had four siblings, two older and two younger: John (born 1896), Nigel (born 1898), Jane (born 1905), and William (born 1907).
Her early education was at Leamington High School (1912–1915), and then at Gravely Manor School in Boscombe (1915–1916) before completion in Godolphin School in Salisbury (1916–1919).
Cartwright studied mathematics at St Hugh's College, Oxford. She graduated in 1923 with a first class degree.
She briefly taught at Alice Ottley School in Worcester and Wycombe Abbey School in Buckinghamshire before returning to Oxford in 1928 to read for her D.Phil. Cartwright was supervised by G. H. Hardy in her doctoral studies.
During the academic year 1928–9 Hardy was at Princeton, so it was E. C. Titchmarsh who took over the duties as a supervisor. Her thesis "The Zeros of Integral Functions of Special Types" was examined by J. E. Littlewood, whom she met for the first time as an external examiner in her oral examination for that 1930 D.Phil.
In 1930, Cartwright was awarded a Yarrow Research Fellowship and went to Girton 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 as Cartwright's Theorem, gives an estimate for the maximum modulus of an analytic function that takes the same value no more than p times in the unit disc. To prove the theorem she used a new approach, applying a technique introduced by Lars Ahlfors for conformal mappings.
Career outline
- 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. Her findings have greatly influenced the direction that the modern theory of dynamical systems. She and Littlewood attracted the engineers' to practical ways of compensating for the electrical "noise".
- In 1945, Cartwright simplified Hermite's elementary proof of the irrationality of π.
- In 1947, she was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society; although she was not the first woman to be elected to that Society, she was the first female mathematician.
- In 1948, Cartwright was appointed Mistress of Girton.
- She was appointed a Reader in the Theory of Functions in Cambridge in 1959 until 1968.
- From 1957 to 1960, she was president of the Cambridge Association of University Women.
- After retiring from Girton, she was a visiting professor at Brown University from 1968 to 1969 and at Claremont Graduate School from 1969 to 1970.
Recognition
Cartwright was the first woman:
- to serve on the Council of the Royal Society
- to be President of the Mathematical Association (in 1951)
- to be President of the London Mathematical Society (in 1961–62)
- to receive the Sylvester Medal (in 1964)
- to receive the De Morgan Medal, the highest award of the London Mathematical Society (in 1968).
In 1968, Cartwright became the first woman to receive the De Morgan Medal, the highest award of the London Mathematical Society, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh (HonFRSE). 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.
Death
Cartwright died in Midfield Lodge Nursing Home in Cambridge on 3 April 1998 at the age of 97.
Interesting facts about Mary Cartwright
- Through her grandmother Jane Holbech, she descended from poet John Donne and William Mompesson, Vicar of Eyam.
- At Oxford, she was the first woman to attain the final degree lectures and to obtain a first.
- Throughout her career, Cartwright wrote over ninety articles on several different mathematical concepts.
- She contributed 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.
Publications
- 1956: Integral Functions, Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics No. 44
See also
In Spanish: Mary Cartwright para niños
