Mary Cartwright
Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright, DBE, FRS, FRSE (17 December
1900 – 3 April 1998)[1] was a British mathematician.
MATHS 4 ALL
Dame Mary Cartwright
DBE FRS FRSE
With J. E. Littlewood, Cartwright was one of the first
mathematicians to study what would later become known as chaos
theory.[2] She saw many solutions to a problem she was studying
and this would later be seen as an example of the butterfly effect.
Contents
Early life and education
Career
Death
Recognition
Publications
Born
17 December 1900
Aynho,
Northamptonshire,
England, UK
Died
3 April 1998
(aged 97)
Cambridge,
England, UK
Alma mater
St Hugh's College,
Oxford
Known for
Cartwright's
theorem
Awards
FRS
DBE
De Morgan Medal
(1968)
Honorary Fellow,
Royal Society of
Edinburgh
(HonFRSE) 1968
Sylvester Medal
(1964)
References
External links
Early life and education
Cartwright was born in Aynho, Northamptonshire, where her father,
William Digby Cartwright, was vicar. Through her grandmother
Jane Holbech she was descended from the poet John Donne and
William Mompesson, the 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]
Cartwright's early education was at Leamington High School (1912–
1915) then Gravely Manor School in Boscombe (1915–1916) before
completion in Godolphin School in Salisbury (1916–1919).[6]
Cartwright studied mathematics at St 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 then
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.[4]
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
Scientific career
Doctoral
G. H. Hardy
"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 this 1930 D.Phil. She would
later establish an enduring collaboration with Littlewood.[4]
In 1930, Cartwright was awarded a Yarrow Research Fellowship and
she 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.[7]
advisor
Doctoral
students
Walter Hayman
Elizabeth McHarg
Other notable Sheila Scott
students
Macintyre
Influences
J. E. Littlewood
Career
Mary Cartwright (far right) at the
International Congress of
Mathematicians in 1932.
In 1936, Cartwright became director of studies in mathematics at
Girton College, and 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 the Department of Scientific and Industrial
Research produced a memorandum regarding certain differential equations which came out of modelling
radio and radar work.[8] They asked the London Mathematical Society if they could help find a
mathematician who could work on these problems and Cartwright became interested in this memorandum.
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. Littlewood wrote:
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.
The fine structure which Littlewood describes here is today seen to be a typical instance of the butterfly
effect. The collaboration led to important results, and these have greatly influenced the direction that the
modern theory of dynamical systems has taken.[9][10]
In 1945, Cartwright simplified Hermite's elementary proof of the irrationality of π. She set her version of the
proof as a Tripos question, later published in an appendix to Sir Harold Jeffreys' book Scientific Inference. In
1947, she was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society and,[11] although she was not the first woman to
be elected to that Society, she was the first female mathematician.[9][10]
Cartwright was appointed Mistress of Girton in 1948 then, in addition, a Reader in the Theory of Functions
in Cambridge in 1959, holding this appointment until 1968.[4] From 1957 to 1960 she was president of the
Cambridge Association of University Women.[12]
After retiring from Girton, Cartwright was a visiting professor at Brown University from 1968 to 1969 and
at Claremont Graduate School from 1969 to 1970.[12]
Death
Cartwright died in Midfield Lodge Nursing Home in Cambridge in 1998.[6]
Recognition
Cartwright was the first woman:
to receive the Sylvester Medal[5]
to serve on the Council of the Royal Society[11]
to be President of the Mathematical Association (in 1951)[13]
to be President of the London Mathematical Society (in 1961–62)[5]
Cartwright also received the De Morgan Medal of the Society in 1968,[14] and that same year she was
elected an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh (HonFRSE).[15] 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.
Publications
1945: (with J. E. Littlewood) "On Non-linear Differential Equations of the Second Order",
Journal of the London Mathematical Society 20: 180 doi:10.1112/jlms/s1-20.3.180 (https://doi.
org/10.1112%2Fjlms%2Fs1-20.3.180)
1956: Integral Functions, Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics No. 44
1964: "From non-linear oscillations to topological dynamics," Journal of the London
Mathematical Society 39: 1931[16]
References
1. "Obituary: Mary Cartwright" (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Obits/Cartwright.htm
l). The Times. 1998.
2. Freeman J. Dyson, Mary Lucy Cartwright (1900–1998): Chaos theory (https://books.google.co
m/books?id=CQeKFG01s-oC&pg=PA169), pp. 169–177, in Out of the Shadows: Contributions
of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics, edited by Nina Byers and Gary Williams, 498 p.
(Cambridge University Press, 2006); ISBN 0-521-82197-5
3. Mary Cartwright (https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=18533) at the
Mathematics Genealogy Project
4. O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Mary Cartwright" (http://www-history.mcs.st-andre
ws.ac.uk/Biographies/Cartwright.html), MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of
St Andrews.
5. O'Connor, J. J.; Robertson, E. F. "Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright" (http://www-history.mcs.st-andr
ews.ac.uk/Biographies/Cartwright.html). School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St
Andrews. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
6. "Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002" (https://www.royalsoced.org.u
k/cms/files/fellows/biographical_index/fells_indexp1.pdf) (PDF). Royalsoced.org.uk. Retrieved
20 December 2015.
7. DeFuria, Jack (22 October 2014). "Mary Lucy Cartwright" (https://prezi.com/2pdjgbqmvfu-/mar
y-lucy-carwright/). Prezi. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
8. "A Point of View: Mary, queen of maths" (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21713163).
BBC News Magazine. 8 March 2013.
9. "Mistress of Girton whose mathematical work formed the basis of chaos theory" (http://cwp.libr
ary.ucla.edu/articles/ebcart11.html). Obituaries Electronic Telegraph. 11 April 1998. Retrieved
8 March 2017.