Mary Lucy Cartwright | Biography

Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright's research and contributions to the field of mathematics have spanned more than seven decades. England claims her as one of its most brilliant citizens and has honored her for the past 50 years. As late as 1996, she was featured, along with two other women scientists, on British television, modestly answering questions about her impressive achievements.

Cartwright was born in Aynho, Northamptonshire, England, on December 17, 1900. Her father, William Digby Cartwright, served as a curate to his uncle, who was a rector at a church. Her mother was Lucy Harriette Maud Bury. The youngest of three children, Cartwright's two other brothers, John and Nigel, were both killed in World War I. When Cartwright was 11 years old, she was sent to live with her maternal uncle, Fred Bury, and his wife Annie, so she could attend Leamington High School, now known as the Kingsley School. There, she learned mathematics from a teacher she remembers as Miss Hancock, to whom she still pays tribute as "an excellent teacher of mathematics." In 1919, Cartwright entered St. Hughes College at Oxford and remained there until 1923. At the age of 23 she graduated from the University of Oxford, then taught first at the Alice Ottley School in Worcester, then at the Wycombie Abbey School for four years before returning to Oxford to complete her doctorate in mathematics. In 1925 Cartwright received the Hurry Prize for mathematics.

One of only five students, Cartwright began study and research with Godfrey Hardy in 1928 and it was under his supervision (as well as of E.C. Titchmarsh) that she pursued her degree. Initially, Hardy was Cartwright's advisor on her thesis, then Titchmarsh took over when Hardy left to spend some time at Princeton University. Hardy is best known for the Hardy-Weinberg law, which resolved the controversy over what proportions of dominant and recessive genetic traits would be reproduced in a large mixed population. Cartwright had great admiration for Hardy, both for his work and for the pains he took in instructing his students. Hardy also collaborated with John E. Littlewood on a series of papers that contributed fundamentally to the theory of Diophantine analysis, divergent series summation, and Fourier series.

Littlewood was Cartwright's examiner for her Ph.D. in 1930. She was the first woman to read for finals in mathematics at Oxford. The meeting was the first in a long series of conferences that would eventually lead to more than ten years of collaboration on a number of projects. Together, Cartwright and Littlewood published four papers on large parameters, differential equations combining topological and analytical methods, solutions for the Van der Pol equation, and chaos theory. They published several other papers, but the content was based on their collaborative work. Based on her own research, Cartwright also published a number of papers concerning classical analysis. Cartwright was a prolific writer; besides mathematical papers, she produced biographical essays on other women mathematicians such as Shelia Scott Macintyre and Grace Chisholm Young for the London Mathematical Society's Journal.

Also in 1930 Cartwright became a Yarrow Research Fellow of Girton. During her fellowship she attended lectures given by Edward Collingwood concerning integral and metamorphic functions. She worked closely with Collingwood on cluster sets in the theory of functions of one complex variable and these papers were also published. Other publications by Cartwright include Religion and the Scientist, Specialization in Education, The Mathematical Mind, and Integral Functions.

In 1935, Cartwright was given a Faculty Assistant Lectureship at Cambridge University and her Yarrow Research Fellowship was extended. Cartwright contributes the appointments to a paper she published entitled "Mathematische Zeitschrift" in early 1935. An earlier version of the paper had been shown to Hardy and Littlewood, and Cartwright believes it was upon their joint recommendations that she was given her position at Cambridge.

During World War II, Cartwright volunteered and served with the British Red Cross Detachment from 1940 to 1944. Cartwright was elected to the Council of the London Mathematical Society for the first time in 1933 and served as a member until 1938. She was again elected in 1961 and served as president until 1963.

In 1949, she was appointed Mistress of Girton College and held that position until her retirement in 1968. During that time she received many honors, including an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Edinburgh in 1953 and Doctor of Science degrees from Leeds in 1958 and from the University of Wales in 1967. Cartwright was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1955 and received the Sylvester Medal of the Royal Society in 1964. Succeeding her Yarrow Fellowships and Lectureship appointments, she became a Reader in Theory of Functions in 1959. At the same time, she additionally served as director of studies in mathematics. In 1968, she was awarded the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society.

Cartwright visited numerous countries around the world, sharing and acquiring knowledge. She was a consultant on the United States Navy Mathematical Research Project at Stanford and Princeton Universities in 1949. Cartwright returned to the United States in 1968 after her retirement and spent two years at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, as a Resident Fellow. While at Brown, she also lectured at Clairmont Graduate School and Case Western Reserve University. Cartwright's years in America made a lasting impression on her. She wrote extensively in her memoirs of the killing of three students at Kent State University and of the many college protests she witnessed, including those at the University of California at Berkeley and the Madison Army Research Centre.

In 1973, she received recognition for her lifetime achievements from the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. The culmination of Cartwright's recognition came in 1969, when she was ordained Dame Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. Cartwright was henceforth known as Dame Cartwright.