Logic and Beauty

68 Reviews LOGIC AND BEAUTY I. Grattan-Guinness Middlesex U. Business School Hendon, London nw4 4bt, uk ivor2@mdx.ac.uk Marjorie Senechal. I Died for Beauty:DorothyWrinch and the Cultures of Science. Oxford and NewYork: Oxford U. P., 2013. Pp. xii, 300. us$34.95. isbn: 9780199732590 . i orn in 1894 in Argentina, where her engineer father was then employed, Wrinch was brought up in England. She entered Girton College in (and yet also outside) Cambridge University in 1913 in order to read for the MathematicalTripos . She passed and indeed took some other courses, but her gender denied her the degree; despite sympathetic colleagues who helped her to develop her obvious talents, the combination of gender bias and her own intellectual competence ensured that much of her career fragmented into a sequence of various short-term appointments, grants and fellowships. It started with a lectureship at University College London from 1918 to 1920, after she had declined an invitation from Karl Pearson in 1916 to join his team there on mathematical statistics. Oxford University came to her aid during the 1920s with part-time posts as mathematical tutor in all five women’s colleges; it even awarded her a higher doctorate in 1929, the first to a woman. The presence of G. H. Hardy at the University during this period will have helped her. Wrinch’s research interests were comparably eclectic, making her an excellent candidate biographee; and this book matches the challenge admirably. One reason is that the author knew her personally and worked as research assistant from around 1970; the personal recollections enrich the account considerably . She has used several archives, includingWrinch’s own and the Russell Archives, and found valuable information for all parts of Wrinch’s life. Wrinch published in a wide range of journals, so that a full bibliography would have been very welcome.1 The book contains a welcome sprinkling of photographs , mostly portraits, but the publisher has reproduced several of them at the original level of murkiness. They have also followed the common but ______ 1 The author states that a Wrinch bibliography is on her website (http://www.marjoriesenechal .com), but I gather that it is not yet ready. _= Reviews 69 inefficient modern practice of identifying a chapter only by its title on the pages of the book but only by its chapter number in the endnotes, so that the reader has to detour to the table of contents. ii The German mathematics abstracting journal Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik lists 33 papers byWrinch between 1916 and 1939.2 Several papers treated the potential theory of spheroids and associated special functions; others handled integral equations and the hypergeometric function. Most of this mathematics is applicable, and indeed several papers examined problems in relativity theory, hydrodynamics and fluid dynamics, seismology and aerodynamics . Some of these papers were prepared under the direction of the Oxford mathematician John Nicholson, supervisor of her higher doctorate in the University of London in 1921, husband in 1922, co-author in 1925, father of her daughter in 1927, but sectioned alcoholic in 1930; she secured a separation order from him that year, and eventually divorced in 1939. In a pseudonymous book Retreat from parenthood (1930) she proposed means of supporting mothers in order to avoid the “homes are hell!” that she had experienced herself; Russell tried to secure a us publisher for it. Several theories involved approximations to mathematical functions, where Wrinch’s co-author of two papers was her father. She also studied asymptotic expansions of a function ( ), divergent infinite inverse power-series in whose coefficients were determined in a way that led to very accurate calculations of ( ). She was a member of the British Association’s Committee on Mathematical Tables, which put her in close touch with E. H. Neville. iii The Jahrbuch list only partially covers Wrinch’s earliest interests, which included the foundations of mathematics, especially transfinite arithmetic.The influence stemmed from lecturer Bertrand Russell (although mathematical logic did not form part of the Mathematics Tripos), and their contacts continued in London when ex-lecturer Russell was in Brixton jail in 1918 for his anti-war activities; she brought...

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