Mary Cartwright

Mary Lucy Cartwright (1900–1998), British mathematician. Born into a modest family—her father was a vicar—she was educated by governesses until the age of eleven, before attending a school where she first took an interest in history, then in mathematics. In 1919, she entered St Hugh's College, Oxford, among the very few women students. There she read Whittaker and Watson's Modern Analysis and joined G. H. Hardy's seminar. In 1923, she was the first woman to obtain a first-class degree. After a period of secondary-school teaching, she returned to Oxford, where, under the supervision of Hardy and Titchmarsh, she prepared a thesis on the zeros of entire functions of special types, defended in 1930. She pursued her career at Cambridge, where she taught function theory until her retirement in 1968, then helped edit Hardy's collected works. Her work covered a broad range: real and complex functions, holomorphic functions, topology, differential equations, nonlinear oscillations and dynamical systems. She is regarded as a pioneer of chaos theory. She received numerous honours.