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My mother, Daphne Medley, who has died aged 105, was an applied mathematician. As one of the few women researching nuclear physics at the Cavendish laboratory, Cambridge, in the mid-1940s, she mixed with the greats of the field, but went on to prioritise family while pursuing a humbler 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 university’s differential analyser, one of the last major mechanical analogue computers, to calculate the magnitudes of forces in the nucleus of a deuterium atom.

In 1948, after her doctorate, she became a maths lecturer at Durham University. However, after four years there she decided she wanted to apply her maths skills to problem-solving, and relocated in 1952 to the Wool Industries Research Association (WIRA) in Leeds.

There she met a fellow physicist, John Medley, whom she married in 1960, leaving the WIRA shortly afterwards to bring up their young family, although in tandem she worked as a part-time lecturer at Leeds before retiring in the early 1980s.

In her spare time Daphne pursued many social and intellectual interests, including hiking, camping, politics and playing music.

She was a member of amateur recorder and renaissance-instrument groups, and during retirement wrote an as-yet unpublished book that applied maths theory to an analysis of the impact of music on our feelings.

John died in 2011. She is survived by their three children, Jill, Brian and me, and four grandchildren.