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]

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]

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]

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]

• Math is good for you
• The Monge project