Bradburn was born on 17 March 1918 in
Normanby in
North Yorkshire, the daughter of a marine engineer and a Scotswoman. She attended a school that didn't approve of girls studying mathematics, but allowed her to progress through the mathematics curriculum at her own rate, several years ahead of the other students. She earned a state scholarship, but at 17, she was below the required age for Oxford and Cambridge, so she ended up going to
Royal Holloway College. She was a student there beginning in 1935 and, despite multiple extracurricular activities, earned first class honours in mathematics in 1938, and completed a master's degree there in 1940. With another scholarship from the
University of London, she went to the
University of Edinburgh for graduate study with
Max Born, beginning in 1941; her dissertation was
The Statistical Thermodynamics of Crystal Lattices. She taught briefly at Edinburgh and the
University of Dundee before returning to Royal Holloway as an instructor in 1945. She remained at Royal Holloway through its 1965 transition from a women's college to a coeducational one (a change that she supported), until her retirement in 1980. ==Recognition and legacy==