Marion Gray
1902-1979
Gray at the Edinburgh Mathematical Colloquium in St Andrews in 1926. Image courtesy of the University of St Andrews MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
Who am I?
Marion Gray was a mathematician. Born in Ayr in 1902 she enrolled at the University of Edinburgh - graduating in 1922 with a first-class honours degree in mathematics and natural philosophy. She obtained a PhD from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and afterward worked in Edinburgh, London and the United States.
Source: Catherine Booth, writing in the National Library of Scotland’s Discover Magazine, Summer 2013.
I am monumental because...
Gray discovered what is now known as the ‘Gray graph’ while working with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in New York. An extraordinary graph with 54 vertices, Gray initially dismissed it as a theoretical construct without practical use. Three decades later it was demonstrated that the ‘Gray graph’ could answer a number of questions regarding symmetry - and it is now cricual in network theory.
The Gray graph. By David Eppstein (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Find out more about Marion Gray
- NLS article
- Superwomen of Science