Elizabeth Monroe Boggs: Cambridge University
Social tennis in Cambridge, circa 1937. From left, John Corner, Elizabeth Monroe, John Lennard-Jones, and Albert Devonshire. Monroe, who was about 1.9m tall, might have sat to avoid towering over her advisor and fellow group members.
The Papers of Sir John Edward Lennard-Jones, GBR/0014/LEJO/13, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. Reproduced with permission.
Monroe reached Cambridge University as an affiliate of Newnham College, one of its two women’s colleges, on time for Michaelmas term 1935. She originally planned to stay a year, and then to enroll in a graduate program back in the US. But somewhere along the way, she realized that theoretical chemistry groups that welcomed women were not so common at American schools. After a term, she had also identified a Cambridge faculty interested in affiliating her, Prof. John E. Lennard-Jones.
Lennard-Jones had himself obtained an undergraduate degree in mathematics, before completing a doctorate on the theory of gases at Cambridge University in 1924. He then joined the physics faculty at Bristol University. A Rockefeller Foundation fellowship brought him to Max Born’s Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen in 1929. There, he interacted closely with chemical bond theorist Walter Heitler and molecular spectroscopist Gerhard Herzberg, with whom he enthusiastically embraced the application of the new wave mechanics to the electronic structure of molecules. This research program eventually landed him a named professorship back at Cambridge, albeit on the chemistry faculty.
Shortly before Monroe joined his group, Lennard-Jones had gotten a Meccano differential analyzer built. Such a substantial investment in mechanical computing aimed to solve the complex differential equations that arose, for instance, in quantum chemistry. Monroe, with a formal background in mathematics and chemistry plus some experience with electronic circuits, surely looked like an ideal candidate for such a project. As a proof of concept for the practical usefulness of the device, she studied the quantum mechanical description of a heterodiatomic cation, HeH2+, thus uncovering the stability of its first excited state.. After completing an enlargement of the analyzer in the spring of 1938, the numerical results for her thesis promptly followed.
In spring 1939, after a few months of professional networking at Princeton, she came back to Cambridge to finish writing her thesis. The political situation, however, quickly deteriorated, with the drums of war beating ever louder. That summer, in anticipation of the war effort, Lennard-Jones organized for the analyzer and for some of his group to transfer to the Ministry of Supply. Monroe was invited to join, thus forgoing a postdoctoral research opportunity she had unearthed at Cornell University. The British war machine, however, could not accommodate an alien doing secret work. In late 1939, she returned to the US.
Context and sources: John Lennard-Jones in Göttingen
Context and sources: Cambridge’s differential analyzer
Context and sources: John Lennard-Jones heading to war
Cite this resource
Patrick Charbonneau, “Elizabeth Monroe Boggs,” Women in the History of Quantum Physics collection, American Institute of Physics, 2026, https://www.aip.org/history/elizabeth-monroe-boggs.