Dorothy Maud Wrinch

Dorothy Maud Wrinch (12 September 1894 – 11 February 1976; married names Nicholson, Glaser) was a mathematician and biochemical theorist best known for her attempt to deduce protein structure using mathematical principles.

Dorothy Wrinch was born in Rosario, Argentina, the daughter of Hugh Edward Hart Wrinch, an engineer, and Ada Souter. The family returned to England and Dorothy grew up in Surbiton, near London. She attended Surbiton High School and in 1913 entered Girton College, University of Cambridge to read mathematics. She graduated in 1916 as a wrangler. She stayed for a fourth year taking the Moral Sciences tripos so that she could study symbolic logic with Bertrand Russell. When Russell was in prison for his anti-war activities Wrinch acted as his unpaid research assistant and personal secretary. Later when Russell went to China he left her with the task of arranging the publication of Wittgenstein's Tractatus in England.

Wrinch's career divides into two periods. Between 1918 and 1932 she published 20 papers on pure and applied mathematics and 16 on scientific methodology and on the philosophy of science. Not surprisingly, Russell had a strong influence on her philosophical work. She also wrote a number of papers with Harold Jeffreys on scientific method; these formed the basis of his 1931 book Scientific Inference. In the Nature obituary Jeffreys wrote, "I should like to put on record my appreciation of the substantial contribution she made to [our joint] work, which is the basis of all my later work on scientific inference."

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