Daphne Medley obituary

My mother, Daphne Medley, an applied mathematician, who has died aged 105, was one of the few women researching nuclear physics at the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge University in the mid-1940s. She mixed with the greats of the field, but went on to prioritise family while pursuing a career as a lecturer. Between lecturing stints at the universities of Durham and Leeds, Daphne also lent her mathematical modelling skills to textile technology, and wrote an undergraduate textbook, An Introduction to Mechanics and Modelling (1982). Born in Bath, Somerset, Daphne was the daughter of Priscilla (nee Le Croissette), a typist, and Wilfrid Padfield, an engineering draftsman. Her parents were idealistic but serious progressives: her father was an active Esperantist and her mother a suffragist. Daphne went to the City of Bath girls’ school and then the University College of the South West of England (now Exeter University), where she studied mathematics. After some teaching and laboratory work during the second world war she went to Girton College, Cambridge, for her PhD studies. At Cambridge, under the supervision of the Russian-born nuclear physicist Nicholas Kemmer, she used the univers