Mary Cartwright

Mary Cartwright was a British mathematician who lived from 1900 to 1998 and was one of the pioneers of what later became known as chaos theory. Born in Aynho, Northamptonshire, she studied mathematics at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and took her doctorate in 1930 under the supervision of G. H. Hardy, with E. C. Titchmarsh covering for him during a year when Hardy was at Princeton. Working at Girton College, Cambridge, she proved a result now known as Cartwright's theorem on analytic functions, and from 1938 she studied with J. E. Littlewood the differential equations that arose in radio and radar work, including the Van der Pol oscillator, an example now seen as a case of the butterfly effect. In 1947 she became the first female mathematician elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1968 she was the first woman to receive the De Morgan Medal.