Mary Cartwright

Mary Lucy Cartwright, titled lady (* December 17 1900 in Aynho in Northamptonshire, † April 3, 1998 in Cambridge ) was an English mathematician who worked on function theory and differential equations.

Life and work

Cartwright began in 1919 at St Hugh's College, Oxford University her studies in mathematics, where she studied with Godfrey Harold Hardy. In 1923 she made ​​there, graduated with top marks. She then worked for a while as a school teacher at the Alice Ottley School in Worcester and Wycombe Abbey School in Buckinghamshire, before returning in 1928 to Oxford, where she ( went as this to Princeton ) in Hardy and was awarded his doctorate by Edward Charles Titchmarsh in 1930 with a work on the zeros of entire functions. My examiner was John Edensor Littlewood, with whom she worked closely later. In 1930 she was Yarrow Research Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, where she attended lectures by Littlewood and one of the problems posed by him broke ( Cartwright's theorem on the maximum amount of an analytic function, the values ​​in the unit disk takes at most times). In 1934, she was on the recommendation of Littlewood and Hardy Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer in 1935 and 1936, Director of Studies at Girton College. 1938 began her long association with Littlewood on nonlinear differential equations that result from the request of the Radio Research Board in cooperation with electromagnetic problems arose (radio waves, radar). They discovered a great sensitivity of the solutions with respect to small changes in initial conditions, which was later popularized in chaos theory as the " butterfly effect ". In 1948 she was Mistress of Girton College in 1959 and an additional reader in function theory, which she remained until her retirement in 1968. After that, they still often held visiting professorships at, for example, in 1968/69 at Brown University and 1969 /70, Poland.

In 1947, she was inducted into the Royal Society ( the first mathematician ) as a member ( "Fellow" ). She was also from 1955 to 1957 in the Council of the Royal Society in 1964 and received the Sylvester Medal. 1961/62 she was President of the London Mathematical Society, the De Morgan medal she won in 1968. In 1969 she was appointed by the Queen to Lady Commander (DBE ) of the Order of the British Empire.