Snezana Lawrence
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Snezana Lawrence FIMA is a Yugoslav and British historian of mathematics, formerly 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]
Books
Lawrence 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,[8]
- Mathematical Meditations (A K Peters/CRC Press, 2025), and
- A Little History of Mathematics (Yale University Press, 2025).[9]
She 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.[10]
