Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright DBE FRS FRSE (17 December 1900 – 3 April 1998)[1] was a British mathematician.

Mary Cartwright was born on 17 December 1900, in Aynho, Northamptonshire, where her father William Digby was vicar.

Through her grandmother Jane Holbech, she descended from poet John Donne and William Mompesson, Vicar of Eyam.

[4] In 1930, Cartwright was awarded a Yarrow Research Fellowship and went to Girton College, Cambridge to continue working on the topic of her doctoral thesis.

They began to collaborate studying the equations, in particular the Van der Pol oscillator, which greatly surprised the two:For something to do we went on and on at the thing with no earthly prospect of "results"; suddenly the whole vista of the dramatic fine structure of solutions stared us in the face.

The collaboration led to important results which have greatly influenced the direction that the modern theory of dynamical systems has taken.

[12][13] Although the duo did not supply the answer in time, they succeeded in directing the engineers' attention away from faulty equipment towards practical ways of compensating for the electrical "noise"—or erratic fluctuations—being produced.

She set her version of the proof as a Tripos question, later published in an appendix to Sir Harold Jeffreys' book Scientific Inference.