Snezana Lawrence

Snezana Lawrence FIMA is a Yugoslav and British historian of mathematics and a senior lecturer in mathematics and design engineering at Middlesex University.[1]

Education and career

Lawrence is originally from Yugoslavia, of mixed Serbian and Jewish ancestry.[2] She studied descriptive geometry at the University of Belgrade before moving to England in 1991 during the Breakup of Yugoslavia and ensuing Yugoslav Wars, and later becoming a naturalized British citizen.[3] She earned her PhD from the Open University in 2002. Her dissertation, Geometry of Architecture and Freemasonry in 19th Century England, was supervised by Jeremy Gray.[4]

While working as a secondary school teacher at St Edmund's Catholic School, Dover in 2004–2005, she won a Gatsby Teacher Fellowship in Mathematics, with which she started a popular web site "Maths is Good For You". The site had the aim of providing a resource to bring more work on the history of mathematics into the secondary school curriculum.[5]

Subsequently, Lawrence moved to post-secondary education, including work as a senior lecturer at Bath Spa University,[6] Anglia Ruskin University,[7] and Middlesex University.[1]

Books

Lawrence is the co-editor, with Irish mathematician Mark McCartney, of the book Mathematicians and their Gods: Interactions between mathematics and religious beliefs (Oxford University Press, 2015), on connections between mathematics and religion.[8] She is the author of A New Year’s Present from a Mathematician (Chapman Hall / CRC Press, 2019), on the nature of mathematics and the definition of mathematicians.[9]

Recognition

Lawrence is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, for whom she was Diversity Champion 2019-2023 and is an elected council member.[10]

References

  1. ^ a b "Dr Snezana Lawrence", Academic and research staff, Middlesex University, retrieved 2020-09-09
  2. ^ Lawrence, Snezana, Diamond, Hanna (ed.), "Anka's Escape from Belgrade", Fleeing Hitler
  3. ^ "About...", The Monge project, archived from the original on 2022-10-02
  4. ^ Snezana Lawrence at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ^ Lawrence, Snezana (July 2006), "Maths is good for you: web-based history of mathematics resources for young mathematicians (and their teachers)", BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, 21 (2), Informa {UK} Limited: 90–96, doi:10.1080/17498430600803375, S2CID 122851275
  6. ^ Author profile from Mathematicians and their Gods
  7. ^ ORCID profile, retrieved 2020-09-09
  8. ^ Reviews of Mathematicians and their Gods:
  9. ^ Review of A New Year’s Present from a Mathematician:
  10. ^ "Snezana Lawrence", Mathematics Today Editorial Board, Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, retrieved 2020-09-09