EVER heard of Dorothy Wrinch? Me neither. But Marjorie Senechal will change that in her biography I Died for Beauty (named after a poem by Emily Dickinson). In it, Senechal makes a decent case for the brilliant mathematician who ended up at the heart of one of science’s big controversies.
A first class honours graduate in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1916, Wrinch was one of few women in a male-dominated environment. But she excelled, going on to study with philosopher Bertrand Russell.
During the next two decades Wrinch published many papers, including some with Harold Jeffreys,…
