Ida Winifred Busbridge was a British mathematician who taught at the University of Oxford from 1935 until 1970.
17 Facts About Ida Busbridge
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Ida Busbridge was the first woman to be appointed to an Oxford fellowship in mathematics.
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Ida Busbridge was born to Percival George Busbridge and May Edith Webb on 10 February 1908.
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Ida Busbridge's father died when she was 8 months old of complications from influenza.
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Ida Busbridge moved schools to Christ's Hospital in 1918, having won a scholarship at the age of ten.
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Ida Busbridge became head girl of the school and was later described as the most brilliant pupil in its 400-year history.
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Ida Busbridge turned down a place at Newnham College Cambridge as the scholarship to Royal Holloway was significantly more generous.
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Ida Busbridge graduated in 1929 with first class honours and was the awarded the Sir John Lubbock Prize for best first class honours of all London University Colleges.
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Ida Busbridge continued her education at Royal Holloway, earning a masters with distinction in mathematics in 1933.
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Ida Busbridge began teaching as a demonstrator in mathematics at University College, London in 1933.
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Ida Busbridge moved to St Hugh's College Oxford in 1935 to teach mathematics alongside Dorothy Wrinch to undergraduates of five women's colleges.
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Ida Busbridge's workload was especially great - not only because other mathematicians at the university were called up for special war service - but because women formed a higher percentage of the undergraduate population during the war years.
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Ida Busbridge was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Ida Busbridge was president of the Mathematical Association for 1964.
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Ida Busbridge was highly regarded as a lecturer and tutor, attending to her students' educational and personal needs.
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Ida Busbridge retired from Oxford in 1970, and became one of the early tutors and developers of courses at the Open University, teaching Lebesgue integration and tutoring complex analysis.
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Ida Busbridge's biography was published by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on 13 August 2020 as part of their collection of biographies of astronomers and mathematicians.