page_title: Sheila Tinney
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Sheila Tinney / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Paul Dirac, Sheila Tinney, and others at DIAS in1942First row from left:Sheila Tinney, Pádraig de Brún, Paul Dirac, Éamon de Valera, Arthur Conway, Arthur Eddington, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Joseph McConnell.
context_page_description: Sheila Christina Tinney was an Irish mathematical physicist. Her 1941 PhD from the University of Edinburgh, completed under the supervision of Max Born in just two years, is believed to make her the first Irish-born and -raised woman to receive a doctorate in the mathematical sciences.
context_section_description: Sheila Christina Power was the fourth of six children born in Galway city to Michael Power [a.k.a. Mícheál de Paor, originally from rural Kilkenny, Chair of Mathematics at University College Galway (UCG) from 1912–1955] and Christina Cunniffe (who died in childbirth when Sheila was 12). She was educated by the Dominican nuns, both in Galway and in Dublin, and was awarded Honours in Mathematics in the Leaving Certificate Examination (the nation's secondary school exit exam), one of only 8 girls to do so in the whole country. After one year attending UCG, she switched to University College Dublin (UCD), from which she graduated with a BSc in 1938, with First Class Honours in Mathematics, and ranked at the top of her class. She did her Master's at UCD in 1939, and was subsequently awarded a National University of Ireland travelling studentship, which enabled her to undertake research at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.  Two years later, in 1941, she earned her doctorate under the supervision of the celebrated physicist Max Born on the stability of crystal lattices.
  Returning to Dublin, she became an assistant lecturer at University College Dublin, and was also one of the first three scholars appointed to the brand new Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), in October 1941. While at the DIAS she worked with Paul Dirac, Arthur Eddington and Erwin Schrödinger. She developed a great interest in quantum physics, and wrote papers with Schrödinger, Hideki Yukawa, and Walter Heitler.  From September 1948 to June 1949 she took a leave of absence from UCD and was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where worked in an environment that included Freeman Dyson, Hermann Weyl, Harish-Chandra, and Albert Einstein.
  She developed the first mathematical courses on quantum mechanics at UCD and taught the subject to generations of students there, until her early retirement in 1979.
  In 1952, she married Seán Tinney, a former engineering student she had lectured, and the couple's three children include classical pianist Hugh Tinney.
caption: Sheila Tinney, Paul Dirac, and other physicists and mathematicians at DIAS in 1942
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