Remembered today for her much publicized feud with Linus Pauling over the shape of proteins, known as “the cyclol controversy,” Dorothy Wrinch made essential contributions to the fields of Darwinism, probability and statistics, quantum mechanics, x-ray diffraction, and computer science. The first woman to receive a doctor of science degree from Oxford University, her understanding of the science of crystals and the ever-changing notion of symmetry has been fundamental to science.
According to her biographer, Marjorie Senechal, (I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science, 2012)
Dorothy Wrinch was a British mathematician and a student of Bertrand Russell. An exuberant, exasperating personality, she knew no boundaries, academic or otherwise. She sowed fertile seeds in many fields of science — philosophy, mathematics, seismology, probability, genetics, protein chemistry, crystallography.
Senechal, describes the secondary schooling Wrinch received at, Surbiton High School ("founded in 1884 with the goal of giving girls an education equivalent to that boys receive") and includes this charming incident from that scholastic environment:
One darkening afternoon, when a girl's front tooth was knocked out in a game, the headmistress lit matches and led the staff and Thomas the cat around the yard in a fruitless search for it.
Perhaps Thomas the cat is a model for the search for knowledge.
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