I have been asked whether Dr. Horace Wrinch (1866-1939) is any relation to Dorothy Maud Wrinch (1894-1976), the renowned mathematician, who also did work in philosophy, physics and bio-chemistry. The answer is yes, but so distant as almost certainly to be unknown to each other. Horace’s great grandfather, (Robert Wrinch (1761-1815), was Dorothy Wrinch’s great great grandfather. They would have had nothing else in common except their name.
Dorothy Wrinch was one of the leading theoretical mathematicians and bio-chemists of her day. Studying mathematics logic at Cambridge’s Girton College, she was a wrangler (that is, she took first class honours in her third year). She studied mathematical logic with G.H. Hardy and Bertrand Russell, whose philosophy she worked on for him while he was in prison for anti-war activities in 1918. Through him, she became acquainted with many members of the Bloomsbury set in 1920’s London. She went to Garsington Manor and knew Clive Bell and Ottoline Morrell. She even introduced Russell to his third wife, Dora Block. Between 1918 and 1932 she published about 20 papers on pure and applied mathematics and 16 on other scientific subjects. She was the first female to be awarded an Oxford University Bsc. From 1932 she turned to studying theoretical biology. She co-founded the influential Biotheoretical Gathering, an inter-disciplinary group that sought to explain life by discovering proteins work. Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, and Nobel prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin were younger members. At the start of the war, Lord Halifax, British Ambassador to the United States, persuaded Wrinch to go to America, where she spent the rest of her working life in academe, notably Smith College, in Massachusetts.
She maintained a long standing academic (and sometimes personal) dispute with Linus Pauling about her theory of protein structure. As it turned out both were correct and incorrect in about equal measure, but the dispute damaged her academic reputation. She has been criticized for spreading her undoubted scientific brilliance too thin and for not staying with theoretical mathematics. Some, nevertheless, think that her influence on scientific progress has been significantly under-estimated. She called her biography “I Died For Beauty.”