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Beatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley
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Chester, England
New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Biography
Beatrice Tinsley was the daughter of Edward Owen Eustace Hill (1907-2001) and Jean O'Hagan Morton (1903-1968). She was called "Beetle" by her family and friends. Edward Hill was born at Winterbourne Park, Bristol, England on 30 March 1907 but the family moved to Wales when he was six years old. He studied history at Magdalen College Oxford and joined the Oxford Group which is a non-denominational revivalist Christian movement which aims to share with others four moral absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. He made trips to the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway and South Africa. He visited the United States in 1929 and 1934 and on both occasions gave his address as Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales. When in Canada he met Jean Morton who was also a member of the Oxford Group; he married her in Carlisle, England, on 31 August 1937. She was born at Grey Fell, Penrith, Cumberland, England on 2 July 1903, the daughter of Sir James Morton and Lady Beatrice Emily. She played the cello to a high standard and also was a writer. Edward and Jean Hill had their first child, a daughter Florence M R Hill known as Rowena, was born in Monmouthshire, Wales in 1938.World War II started in September 1939 and Edward Hill became a staff captain in the infantry and later was promoted to major. During the war the family lived in Chester and their second child, Beatrice Muriel Hill, the subject of this biography, was born there in 1941. She was born prematurely, probably caused by a terrifying air raid, and was not expected to live. She survived, but the war meant that food and coal was rationed and looking after a newly born child in the middle of winter was hard. The family employed Constance Gullidge as a nanny. Edward Hill wrote in [16] that Nanny Gullidge:-
... had been possibly the most important person in Beatrice's life.Beatrice's younger sister, Theodora J Hill, was born in Chester in 1943. After World War II ended in 1945, Edward Hill was demobbed and he returned to Wales [26]:-
Edward and Jean began to consider moving overseas to escape post-war scarcity and rationing, bouts of whooping cough and chickenpox, and dissatisfaction with their extended families. Following a chance meeting with a New Zealand expatriate, in 1946 the family emigrated to Christchurch ...After sailing to New Zealand, the Hill family settled in Christchurch in the autumn of 1946. Edward Hill was ordained in Christchurch in 1946 and became a curate at St Mary's Merivale, in the suburb of Christchurch to the north of the city centre. As soon as the family arrived in Christchurch, Beatrice began attending the prep school attached to St Margaret's College, an independent girls' school founded on Anglican Christian values. After two years Edward Hill became a vicar of Southbridge by Lake Ellesmere; Southbridge is about 60 km from Christchurch. After the family moved to Southbridge in 1948 Beatrice attended Southbridge Primary School, attached to Southbridge District High School. The Primary School, founded in 1868, still exists today, but High School was replaced in 1981.
The Hill family only spent two years in Southbridge before moving to New Plymouth where again Edward Hill was an Anglican vicar. Beatrice attended New Plymouth Central Primary School but soon moved for her secondary education to New Plymouth Girls' High School. The co-educational New Plymouth High School had opened in 1885 but in 1913 New Plymouth Girls' High School had split off as a separate institution. When Beatrice studied there the Girls' High School was flourishing under its head Annie Rose Allum. It had high academic standards and sport, music and the arts played important roles. Beatrice showed her outstanding potential, topped her class in every year at the school, and in addition won prizes in piano and violin. Mathematics was a hobby as well as a school subject and she also was keen on ballet and joined the pony club. She already had ambition as is clear from the verse she wrote describing the view looking out her bedroom window in New Plymouth:-
I see the dainty blue sea lightly tipped with foamThe three Hill girls grew up in a family with very strong religious values. Both Edward and Jean Hill had been members of the Oxford Group and continued to live by the Four Absolutes of that religious movement: Absolute Love, Absolute Purity, Absolute Honesty and Absolute Unselfishness [9]:-
Over these wide waters I'd someday like to roam.
Beatrice grew up with religious and philosophical discussions around the dinner table, the big questions of life, death and the universe.While at New Plymouth Girls' High School, Beatrice, reacting against the intense family religious environment but still wishing to please her parents, began to look towards science as the answer to the fundamental questions of life. She joined the school astronomy club and found inspiration in Fred Hoyle's book The nature of the universe. The book, published in 1950, is based on lectures Hoyle had given on BBC radio.
Edward Hill resigned as a vicar in New Plymouth and approached the Junior Chamber of Commerce to stand for mayor of the city. Everard Gilmour had been mayor since 1933 and, in 1953, Edward Hill stood against him and two other candidates. Despite being a newcomer to the city, Hill was elected and served for three years. He received Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh when they visited New Plymouth in 1954 and, during his three years as mayor [33]:-
... the New Plymouth library and museum complex was approved, the fountain was installed in the Pukekura Park lake; parking meters were introduced and trams were replaced by trolley buses.In 1956, although Edward Hill was defeated in the mayoral election, he was elected to serve on the New Plymouth Borough Council. It was not only Beatrice's father who was achieving fame, her mother also had her first book published in 1953. This book, Wind May Blow by Jean O Hill, is set in England and New Zealand and promotes the author's high religious and moral values.
In 1957, Beatrice Hill specialised in mathematics, physics and chemistry at New Plymouth Girls' High School. The head Annie Rose Allum had advised her to specialise in English but when she said how determined she was to study more mathematics, Annie Allum arranged for her to attend mathematics classes at New Plymouth Boys' High School. She was dux of the High School in 1957 and, being ranked one of the best ten students in New Zealand, she was awarded a Junior University Scholarship. With this achievement she followed her elder sister Rowena who had achieved similar honours in 1954 and went on the become a professor of English in Venezuela. Perhaps surprisingly, despite Beatrice's academic ambitions, she became engaged to a young man in 1958 but terminated the engagement in the following year.
She began her university studies at the women's hostel Helen Connon Hall, Canterbury University in 1958. This university had been established in Christchurch as University College in 1873 based on the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England but admitting women students from the start. It was renamed Canterbury University College in 1933, and the name was changed to Canterbury University in 1957, the year before Beatrice began her studies there. She took courses in mathematics, physics and chemistry in her first year but found she knew the material they covered already so she started to go further in all the topics reading books. In her second year she studied Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Physics. In a letter to her mother she wrote (see, for example, [35]):-
I want both: the maths to reason with and the physics to apply it to.In March 1959 she saw the book Theories of the Universe edited by Milton K Munitz in the University Bookshop. She bought the book and was fascinated to read the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, William Herschel, Einstein, Hubble, Eddington, Hoyle and many more. She wrote to her mother saying [35]:-
One could more or less add to it oneself.Life wasn't all studying [9]:-
Her student life was enriched by playing the violin in an orchestra, belonging to a philosophical debating club, the Socratic Society, and doing volunteer community work. She also had the good fortune to be able to use what was only the second computer to be imported into New Zealand, thus becoming familiar with an essential tool early in her short career.At the Socratic Society, Beatrice met Brian Alfred Tinsley who was at that time studying for a Ph.D. in physics. Brian Tinsley, born in Wellington, New Zealand on 23 April 1937, was interested in atmospheric and space physics. Beatrice and Brian Tinsley were married at St Aidan's Church in Miramar, Wellington, on 13 May 1961. Beatrice graduated with a B.Sc. in 1961 and was awarded a Senior Scholarship to enable her to remain at Canterbury University to study for an M.Sc. Beatrice wanted to specialise in cosmology but this was not possible at Canterbury University and she was advised to study for an M.Sc. in physics.
Beatrice and Brian Tinsley set up their home in the centre of Christchurch where Beatrice took on the traditional "wife's role" of shopping, preparing meals and cleaning the home. To bring in some extra money, she did some teaching at Christchurch Girls' High School, took on some paid tasks in the University Physics Department and even took private pupils. Somehow she was able to undertake all these tasks and still obtain top grades in all her courses. Her physics M.Sc. thesis Theory of the Crystal Field of Neodymium Magnesium Nitrate had no relation to cosmology and her father writes in [16]:-
For this she gained first class honours, but, as soon as the thesis was complete, was agog to return to cosmology. Possibly because her work was not really interesting, she almost became disillusioned with research as such during that year, stating that she and Brian were both feeling they wanted to "understand as much as possible about people" and were afraid that taking up some specific line of research might cut them off from "wider usefulness in the world." But nothing more was said about this once she returned to her own line of study.Although she may not have enjoyed working on physics, her work was outstanding. She was awarded an M.Sc. in 1962 and received the Haydon Prize for Physics, the Cook Memorial Prize, the Warwick House Prize, the Memorial Scholarship and a Postgraduate Scholarship.
The Graduate Research Center of the Southwest was officially opened on 14 February 1961 in Dallas, Texas, United States. It was a privately funded, basic research institution, with the first facility the Laboratory of Earth and Planetary Science opened in 1964. Brian Tinsley was appointed to a research position there and the family left New Zealand for Dallas in 1963. Dallas seemed an excellent place for Beatrice since soon after she arrived she was able to attend the 'First Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics' held in Dallas 16-18 December 1963. All the leading researchers were at the symposium and Beatrice was thrilled to see in person the people whose work she had read about. Robert Oppenheimer presented a paper on gravitational collapse and both Maarten Schmidt and Jesse Greenstein spoke about their recent discovery that quasars were high redshift compact objects.
The young couple wanted children but, when Beatrice failed to conceive, the doctors told her it was unlikely she could ever have a child. Beatrice Tinsley quickly found that there were no career opportunities for her in Dallas and she registered to study for a Ph.D. in the Astronomy Department of the University of Texas at Austin starting in September 1964. Texas is vast and Austin is around 200 miles from Dallas so she adopted the strategy of each week flying there on Tuesday and coming back by bus on Friday afternoon. She had to rent a room in Austin and fares and rent made this an expensive option but with no child and no research opportunities in Dallas, it was an option she felt she had to take.
In Austin her thesis advisor was Rainer Kurt Sachs who had come to the United States from Germany with his Jewish family in 1937 to avoid persecution. He was a mathematical physicist with an interest in general relativistic cosmology and astrophysics. Beatrice's research went extremely well and very rapidly. She had almost completed work on her thesis when the opportunity to adopt a baby came. Alan Roger was born in New Zealand to a relative of Brian Tinsley on 28 August 1966 and Beatrice went to New Zealand to collect the child and bring him back to Dallas. She submitted her thesis Evolution of galaxies and its significance for cosmology in January 1967 and was awarded a Ph.D. For more information about this thesis, see THIS LINK.
Beatrice felt that it was unfair to have Alan Roger as an only child, so the Tinsleys adopted a second child, Theresa Jean, born 10 May 1968. In fact Beatrice's mother had died on 7 May 1968 and her funeral was held on the day Theresa Jean was born. The next few years were very difficult for Beatrice with two young children to care for but as always she seems to have coped remarkably well continuing studying papers, doing research, but also keeping up her musical interests joining the Richardson Symphony Orchestra and being involved in various charities.
In 1969 the Research Center where Brian Tinsley worked became the University of Texas in Dallas. This did not change the fact that Beatrice Tinsley could not have a permanent position there because her husband was employed. In 1967 she had delivered a lecture on the work she had undertaken for her Ph.D. at a conference in New York. There she had met James Gunn who worked at the California Institute of Technology. Gunn arranged a 3-month appointment for Beatrice Tinsley at the California Institute of Technology in 1972. She went to Pasadena with her two children and undertook research with a number of the astronomers there. Her remarkable abilities were quickly recognised by her collaborators and she was thrilled to be involved in intense collaborations which she had not previously experienced. For example she published the paper An unbounded universe? in 1974 in collaboration with Richard Gott III, James Gunn and David Schramm. The Abstract reads:-
A variety of arguments strongly suggest that the density of the universe is no more than a tenth of the value required for closure. Loopholes in this reasoning may exist, but if so, they are primordial and invisible, or perhaps just black.You can see a list of some papers that Beatrice Tinsley published, with their Abstracts, at THIS LINK.
With a growing reputation, Beatrice was now offered positions at several universities. The University of Maryland offered her an 18-month appointment in 1973 but her husband insisted she only signed up for six months. The family spent the six months living in Silver Springs near Washington with Beatrice working at the University of Maryland and Brian commuting to a job in Washington. Towards the end of 1973 she accepted a half-time position as assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and, as she had done when working on her Ph.D., she did a weekly commute from Dallas.
In 1974 Beatrice was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Award, the first year it was awarded by the American Association of University Women with advice from the American Astronomical Society. Beatrice and Brian Tinsley were divorced on 27 August 1974 and, against her wishes, he was given custody of their two children. The summer of 1974 Beatrice spent travelling. First she visited the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge, England, which had been was founded by Fred Hoyle in 1967. Although her early work building mathematical models of galaxy evolution were originally controversial and almost ignored, by 1974 they were receiving much attention and Beatrice said:-
It's funny to realise that my thesis work, which is now regarded as a useful step forward in astronomy, was generally regarded as impossible speculation at the time!It is worth briefly looking at why her work was initially thought of as "impossible speculation." She was building a mathematical model of galaxy evolution but, at this time, the data required for such models was poorly understood. What was the initial mass of gas from which a galaxy was built? How much of this gas formed long-lived dim stars which were not visible? The evolutionary history of stars was only just beginning to be understood and it was not known how much material from dying stars was recycled to form new stars. Tinsley appears to be the first to have the optimism to make mathematical models despite the poorly understood initial data.
From the 1940s to the 1960s astronomers had argued between the big bang theory of the universe and the steady state theory. What was needed was observational tests to distinguish between them. This was Tinsley's aim with her mathematical models, to come up with observational tests to distinguish between different cosmological theories. Joann Eisberg write [11]:-
She was able to assemble a series of models that evolved into galaxies with photometric properties matching those presently observed, and the change in their colour and magnitude over cosmological timescales was substantial. She then calculated the evolutionary correction appropriate to several competing cosmologies and found that it reduced the difference between the magnitude-redshift relations that they predicted, making it harder to choose between them. Though this was not the model-testing result Tinsley first sought, it opened an intriguing possibility. ...The paper Will the Universe Expand Forever? by Richard Gott III, James Gunn, David Schramm and Beatrice M Tinsley published by Scientific American in 1976 aims at explaining the use of mathematical models in a non-technical way. You can read the Introduction at THIS LINK.
Towards the end of 1974 Beatrice Tinsley accepted the position of associate professor at Yale University. She did not, however, take up the post immediately. Leaving her Dallas home on Christmas day 1974, she went first to the California Institute of Technology to work with James Gunn. She then spent six months as an assistant research astronomer and lecturer at Lick Observatory before finally taking up her position at Yale University.
At Yale, together with help from colleagues, she organised the 'Yale International Conference on the Evolution of Galaxies and Stellar Populations' held in May 1977. James Gunn said [8]:-
It was the single most important galaxy conference in the history of the subject. There has been no other similar conference.Following the conference, Beatrice Tinsley continued her fill her days with an incredible amount of research and pleasure. She proved herself an excellent teacher, produced a flood of top quality papers, invited many leading scientists to visit her department, continued to play chamber music, and sat on various Yale committees where she vigorously put forward her feminist views. Tragedy struck however when she was diagnosed with cancer in early 1978. She had an operation for a melanoma on her left leg but doctors told her that all they could do was give her radiotherapy to prolong her life. The side effects of the treatment were severe but she continued to teach, undertake research and travel to conferences. In July 1978 Beatrice Tinsley was appointed as a full professor at Yale.
Brian Tinsley had married again and in 1979 he decided he could not cope with eleven year old Theresa Jean, and she was sent to live with Beatrice. This was an almost impossible situation for Beatrice who was suffering severely from the side effects of her cancer treatment. Her Yale colleague and collaborator Richard Larson moved into her apartment to care for her and Theresa Jean.
By November 1980 the cancer had spread and she had a brain tumour which caused her to be partially paralysed. Unable to use her right hand, she taught herself to write with her left hand and continued to write papers until a few days before her death in March 1981. Her funeral was held on 28 March 1981, she was cremated and her ashes buried in Grove Street Cemetery. Sandra Faber wrote in [12]:-
No tribute to Beatrice Tinsley would be complete without emphasizing her strongly positive, even inspirational, impact on colleagues and students. Those around her were enlivened by Beatrice's obvious zest for her own scientific endeavours, a joy she never relinquished even during her long illness. Equally stimulating was her enthusiasm for research going on around her. Always interested in new results, she plied one with astute questions, all the while radiating appreciation and encouragement.Many tributes to Beatrice Tinsley have been made in the years following her death; we name a few of them. Minor planet 3087 Beatrice Tinsley discovered on 30 August 1981 has been named for her. In 1986 the American Astronomical Society established the Beatrice M Tinsley Prize. In 2010 Mt Tinsley in Fiordland's Kepler Mountains, New Zealand was named for her. In 2012 the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand established the Beatrice Hill Tinsley Lectures. In 2019 New Zealand issued a Beatrice Hill Tinsley stamp in their 'New Zealand Space Pioneers' series and in 2022 they issued another stamp in a 'Women Scientists' series. In October 2019 the University of Canterbury opened the Beatrice Tinsley building for science staff and postgraduate students. Present were 130 guests including members of Beatrice Tinsley's family, some of whom travelled from the United States to be there.
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Written by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Last Update August 2024
Last Update August 2024