Dorothy Wrinch

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Dorothy Wrinch, 1921

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

Life

Wrinch was the daughter of a British engineer and grew up near London. She studied from 1913 mathematics at Girton College of Cambridge University and made in 1916 graduated with excellent grades (Wrangler) in the Tripos examinations . She then passed the Tripos exams in philosophy (moral science) to study symbolic logic with Bertrand Russell . She was Russell's unpaid assistant when he was imprisoned for his anti-war stance during World War I. Her later duties as Russell's assistant included preparing Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus for printing . She has published on mathematics (logic, analysis, probability theory) and philosophy of science, where she also 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 obtained her master's degree in 1920 and her doctorate in 1922. She returned to Girton College in 1921 on a research fellowship.

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

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

From 1942 she was at Smith College in a specially established research professorship for physics until her retirement in 1971. During the summer months, she and her husband did research frequently in the Woods Hole laboratory and after her retirement in 1971 she moved entirely to Woods Hole. In 1943 she became a US citizen. In 1945 she became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

In 1929 she was the first woman to receive a D. Sc. received from Oxford University.

plant

From the beginning of the 1930s she turned to biology - where she approached molecular biology from a mathematical point of view - and in 1932 she was a founding member of an interdisciplinary British group of scientists in Cambridge (Theoretical Biology Club), which dealt with the functioning of proteins (this also included Joseph Needham , CH Waddington , John Desmond Bernal and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin ). From 1931 to 1934 she visited laboratories and universities in Berlin, Vienna, Paris and London. In 1935 she received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for her research. Although she had no training as a chemist, she put forward a cyclol theory of protein structure that received considerable attention at the time. In 1937 she presented the theory on a lecture tour in the USA. A controversy arose with Linus Pauling , who criticized the special cyclol bond on which the protein structure was based as being thermodynamically unstable. X-ray crystallographers also contradicted the theory. To prove her theory, she conducted experiments with Irving Langmuir . The Cyclol model was the first model of the structure of globular proteins and their folding. Wrinch imagined the structure of proteins from building blocks similar to mathematical polyhedra, held together by cyclole bonds. For example, she used it to construct layer structures similar to the beta sheet . Although the model turned out to be wrong, Wrinch was proved right in some respects, such as the important role hydrophobic effects play in protein folding.

In the 1940s she dealt in particular with the interpretation of X-ray crystallographic recordings and wrote a monograph on it. She also wrote two books on the structure of proteins.

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

literature

  • Marjorie Senechal (Editor): Structure of Matter and Patterns in Science. Proceedings of a symposium inspired by the work and life of Dorothy Wrinch , September 1977. Schenkman Publishing Co., Cambridge 1980
  • Marjorie Senechal: I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science , Oxford University Press, New York 2013

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ He supported their cyclol theory
  2. ↑ APS Fellow Archive. APS Fellows 1945. American Physical Society, accessed December 12, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Needham published Order and Life in 1936 , which grew out of discussions within the group
  4. ↑ In which he was wrong, in 1952 a Swiss chemist found it in ergot alkaloids. The discovery also encouraged Dorothy Wrinch to advance and develop her theory.
  5. ↑ These are connections between the nitrogen of the peptide bond and the carbon of the carbonyl group of the proteins, whereby a hydroxyl group is formed instead of the carbonyl group.
  6. ↑ Fourier transforms and structure factors. The American Society for X-Ray and Electron Diffraction 1946, Reprint 1966
  7. ^ Chemical aspects of the structure of small peptides. An introduction. Munksgaard, Copenhagen 1960
  8. ^ Chemical Aspects of Polypeptide Chain Structures and the Cyclol Theory, Plenum Press, New York, 1965
personal data
SURNAME Wrinch, Dorothy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wrinch, Dorothy Maud
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician and scientist
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Rosario , Argentina
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 1976
Place of death Falmouth, Massachusetts