Dorothy Maud Wrinch

Dorothy Maud Wrinch ( born September 12, 1894 in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina, † February 11, 1976 in Falmouth ( Massachusetts)) was a British mathematician. They also dealt with the philosophy of science and biology.

Life

Wrinch was the daughter of a British engineer and grew up in London. She studied mathematics at Girton College from 1913 the University of Cambridge in 1916 and made their degree with good grades ( Wrangler ) in the Tripos examinations. Then she also graduated from the Tripos examinations in Philosophy ( Moral Science ) by Bertrand Russell in studying symbolic logic. She was Russell's unpaid assistant when he was imprisoned for his anti -war stance during the First World War. Among her later role as Russell's assistant was the preparation for printing of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus. She has published over mathematics ( logic, analysis, probability theory ), and Philosophy of Science, where she worked with Harold Jeffreys. In 1918 she won the Gamble Prize of Girton College and from 1918 to 1920 she was a lecturer in mathematics at University College London, where she took a Master's degree in 1920 and his doctorate in 1922. She returned in 1921 with a research grant to the Girton College back.

In 1922 she married the theoretical physicist John William Nicholson ( 1881-1955 ) and moved to Oxford with this. She had with him a daughter ( born 1928), left him but 1930 ( Nicholson had alcohol problems and suffered a mental breakdown ) and was divorced from him in 1938 after Nicholson was admitted because of his mental problems. At Oxford, she taught part-time at some of the women's colleges. 1927 Lecturer at Lady Margaret Hall College ( the first woman in Oxford, which was qualified as a lecturer in mathematics).

In 1939, she went to the USA, where he married in 1941 the biologist Otto Glaser ( 1880-1951 ), professor at Amherst College was, and held various visiting professorships ( Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College in 1940 and a year in the Chemistry Faculty of the Johns Hopkins University).

From 1942 she was at Smith College in a specially equipped research professor of physics until her retirement in 1971., The summer months, she did research with her husband frequently in Woods Hole laboratory and after her retirement in 1971, she moved all the way to Woods Hole. In 1943, she became a U.S. citizen.

In 1929, she was the first woman to a D. Sc. Oxford University awarded.

Work

From the early 1930s, she turned to biology - in which she approached from mathematical side of molecular biology - and in 1932 founding member of an interdisciplinary UK research group in Cambridge ( Theoretical Biology Club ), which dealt with the function of proteins ( this included also Joseph Needham, CH Waddington, John Desmond Bernal and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin ). She attended 1931-1934 laboratories and universities in Berlin, Vienna, Paris and London. In 1935 she received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for their research. Although she had no training as a chemist, she put on a Cyclol theory of protein structure, which at that time was quite a stir. In 1937 she was theorized before on a lecture tour in the United States. There was a controversy with Linus Pauling, who criticized the special Cyclol bond, which it presented to the protein structure based on a thermodynamically unstable. Also Röntgenkristallographen contradicted the theory. To prove their theory, they undertook experiments with Irving Langmuir. The Cyclol model was the first model of the structure of globular proteins and their folding. Wrinch stood in front of the building blocks of proteins from similar mathematical polyhedra held together by Cyclolbindungen. For example, she designed so that layer structures similar to the beta-sheet. Although the model turned out to be wrong, Wrinch kept in some aspects of law, as in the important role of hydrophobic effects in protein folding.

In the 1940s it was primarily concerned with the interpretation of X-ray crystallographic recordings and wrote a monograph She also wrote two books on the structure of proteins.

Under the pseudonym Jean Ayling 1930, she published a book about the problems as a working woman raising a child ( The retreat from parenthood ).