Ida Winifred Busbridge (1908–1988) was a British mathematician who taught at the University of Oxford from 1935 until 1970.
[2] In 1926 she enrolled in Royal Holloway College, London, intending to specialise in physics, but switched to mathematics in 1928.
She turned down a place at Newnham College Cambridge as the scholarship to Royal Holloway was significantly more generous.
[1] Influenced by Madge Adam and Harry Plaskett, she shifted her interest to applications of maths in astronomy and physics.
The principal, Rachel Trickett, quoted Dorothy Wrinch in describing Ida Busbridge as ‘quite simply the best woman mathematician I’ve ever met: brilliant and yet so capable and unassuming’.
[2] In 1983, a former student made a donation of £280,000 to endow the Ida Busbridge fellowship in mathematics at St Hugh's.