I Died for Beauty by Marjorie Senechal

I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science by Marjorie Senechal (Author). In the vein of A Lovely Thoughts, The Man Who Beloved Solely Numbers, and Rosalind Franklin: The Darkish Woman of DNA, this quantity tells the poignant story of the good, colorful, controversial mathematician named Dorothy Wrinch.

Drawing on her personal and professional relationship with Wrinch and archives within the United States, Canada, and England, Marjorie Senechal explores the life and work of this provocative, scintillating minds. Senechal portrays a girl who was learned, stressed, imperious, exacting, critical, witty, and kind. A young disciple of Bertrand Russell whereas at Cambridge, the first girls to obtain a physician of science diploma from Oxford University, Wrinch's contributions to mathematical physics, philosophy, chance concept, genetics, protein construction, and crystallography had been something however inconsequential. But Wrinch, an advanced and in the end tragic figure, is remembered at the moment for her a lot publicized feud with Linus Pauling over the molecular structure of proteins. Pauling finally won that bitter battle. But, Senechal reminds us, among the giants of mid-century science--together with Niels Bohr, Irving Langmuir, D'Arcy Thompson, Harold Urey, and David Harker--took Wrinch's facet in the feud. What accounts for her huge if now-forgotten influence? What did these famend thinkers, in such completely different fields, hope her model may explain?

Senechal presents a sympathetic portrait of the life and work of a luminous but tragically flawed character. At the same time, she illuminates the subtler prejudices Wrinch confronted as a feisty woman, profound tradition clashes between scientific disciplines, ever-altering notions of symmetry and pattern in science, and the puzzling roles of beauty and truth.

I loved this e book, wherein Marjorie Senechal integrates an account of Wrinch's enthusiastic about the geometrical construction of proteins and the philosophy of science in the historic context of her life in Britain and the US among the many trendy founders of those fields, Wrinch among them; and the difficulties dealing with girls--even difficult and feisty women! --to find support for his or her work. Senechal, herself a distinguished mathematician and thinker of science who met Wrinch at Smith, turns at occasions in her own private historical past of turning into a scientist and writer; at times to the mental problem of the issues; at occasions to the fierce educational in-preventing for turf and theory. Theory and philosophy have been wrong; however the pattern Senechal creates is gorgeous, chaotic, and complex.

When last Dorothy Wrinch was a famous scientist --about seventy years in the past-- she was known mostly for the structure she proposed for proteins. As it has since turned out to be clear that proteins have a fairly different construction, the textbooks on protein chemistry can omit mention of her; they usually do. Marjorie Senechal's telling of the controversy recreates the excitement of exploration in a scientific world where the best path was nonetheless not known. It's an added fillip to be informed how Wrinch's scheme was rejected on grounds which in retrospect have been also erroneous. Science advances on a litter of discarded hypotheses, certainly! I have informed of this transient assessment only probably the most momentous lesson of the e-book; it's a many-faceted mental biography of a many-faceted individual, and the story is full of delights and surprises. 

I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science 

Marjorie Senechal (Author)

312 pages

Oxford University Press, USA (December 3, 2012)

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