Leila Schneps

"Catherine Shaw" redirects here. For the Canadian director and actor, see Kathryn Shaw.

Leila Schneps
File:Leila Schneps (2011).jpg
Born	(1961-12-22) December 22, 1961 Waltham, Massachusetts, United States
Pen name	Catherine Shaw
Occupation	Mathematician Author
Language	English French German
Nationality	American
Education	PhD
Alma mater	University of Paris
Subject	Mathematics
Children	4
Website
www.math.jussieu.fr/~leila

Leila Schneps (born December 22, 1961) is an American mathematician, living in France, employed by Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and based at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu of Pierre and Marie Curie University, France, where she specializes in number theory. In addition to academic publication, she has edited several text books on aspects of mathematics, written a popular book and articles on the use and abuse of mathematics in criminal proceedings, and, under the pseudonym Catherine Shaw, written a series of mathematically themed murder mysteries.

Education

Schneps earned a B.A. in Mathematics, German Language and Literature from Harvard/Radcliffe University in 1983, then took up graduate studies in France. She completed a Doctorat de Troisième Cycle in Mathematics at Université Paris-Sud XI-Orsay in 1985, with a thesis studying p-adic L-functions attached to elliptic curves, a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1990, with a thesis on p-Adic L-functions and Galois groups, and Habilitation at Université de Franche-Comté in 1993, with a thesis on the Inverse Galois problem.

Professional experience

Schneps held various teaching assistant positions in France and Germany until the completion of her Ph.D. in 1990, then worked as a postdoctoral assistant at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland for one year. In 1991 she was awarded a tenured research position at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, where she still works. During the late 1990s Schneps also had short-term visiting researcher assignments at Harvard University, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and MSRI at Berkeley.

Publications

Academic

Schneps has published academic papers on various aspects of analytic number theory since the late 1980s. Her early work explored p-Adic L-functions, which became the topic of her first thesis, and she continues to work on the related fields of zeta functions.

Since the late 1990s she focused on aspects of Galois theory, including Galois groups, geometric Galois actions, and the inverse Galois problem, and has been called, by one mathematics professor, "the arithmetic geometer . . . who taught me most of what I know about Galois actions on fundamental groups of varieties". Her work led to her study of the related Grothendieck–Teichmüller group, and she has become a member of a group preserving the works and history of Grothendieck. Her most recent work has investigated various aspects of Lie algebras.

Books

Schneps has also edited and contributed to several mathematics textbooks in number theory. She edited a series of lecture notes on Grothendieck's theory of dessins d'enfants and contributed an article to the series, was an editor for a text on the Inverse Galois Problem, and edited a book on Galois groups. She was a co-author of a text on Field Theory and co-editor of another on Galois–Teichmüller Theory.

Schneps' latest book is Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom, which she co-authored with her daughter, mathematician Coralie Colmez. This book, targeted for a general audience, uses 10 historical legal cases to show how mathematics, especially statistics, can affect the outcome of criminal proceedings, especially when incorrectly applied or interpreted. While not written as a textbook, some reviewers have found it suitable for students, as an introduction to the topic and to "get them thinking, talking and even arguing about the issues involved", with another agreeing that, "they have struck the right balance of providing enough mathematics for the specialist to check out the details, but not so much as to overwhelm the general reader", and another finding the book suitable "for parents trying to support teenagers in their studies of mathematics – or in fact, law".

While most reviews are positive, there has been some criticism concerning its over-simplification of mathematics' influence in complex trial proceedings. One reviewer finds that, while the book's description of the weakness of some mathematics presented in courtrooms is valid, that the text magnifies mathematics' role in legal proceedings, which traditionally feature evidentiary analysis at appellate as well as trial stages and have preexisting standards for treating certain types of evidence. Another suggests the book influenced by the authors' selection of cases to show a "disastrous record of causing judicial error", thus attributing insufficient weight to the counterbalancing traditionally inherent in legal proceedings—as lawyers attack opposing evidence and experts with their own, and appellate judges write to influence the conduct of trial judges faced with various types of ordinary and expert testimony.

Translations

Schneps has produced English-language translations of several French-language books and papers, including Invitation to the mathematics of Fermat-Wiles, Galois theory, A Mathematician Grappling With His Century, Hodge Theory and Complex Algebraic Geometry II, p-adic L-Functions and p-Adic Representations, and Renormalization methods : critical phenomena, chaos, fractal structures.

Grothendieck

Alexander Grothendieck, author of the theories upon which some of the above works are based, became a recluse in 1991 and removed his published works from circulation. More than a decade later, Schneps and Pierre Lochak located him in a town in the Pyrenees, then carried on a correspondence. Thus they became among "the last members of the mathematical establishment to come into contact with him". Schneps became a founding member of the Grothendieck Circle, a group dedicated to making information by and about Grothendieck available, and created and maintains the Grothendieck Circle website, a repository of information regarding Grothendieck, including his own unpublished writings. She also assisted with the translation of his correspondence with Jean-Pierre Serre.

As Catherine Shaw

In 2004, new author Catherine Shaw published The Three Body Problem, a Cambridge Mystery, a murder mystery novel involving mathematicians in Cambridge in the late 1800s, working on the three-body problem. The title is a double entendre, referring to both the mathematical problem and the three murder victims. While a mathematician reviewing the book disliked the Victorian writing style, he found the math accurate, and the mathematicians' personalities and sociology "well portrayed". When another reviewer contacted the author, she confirmed that Catherine Shaw was a pseudonym and that she was, in reality, an academic and practicing mathematician but preferred to remain anonymous. It has since been revealed that Catherine Shaw is the pseudonym of Leila Schneps.

Schneps, as Catherine Shaw, has published four more historical novels in the series, all featuring the same main character Vanessa Duncan, and all following mathematical themes:

Flowers Stained with Moonlight was called a mystery that was "very easy to solve", as the book's title is from a poem by Lord Alfred Douglas, which strongly hits at the solution to the crime.

The Library Paradox also has a double entendre title, as the story is a classic locked room mystery set in a library, but also alludes to Russell's paradox, which arises from the question of whether a library catalog should include itself in its contents. The murder victim in the story was antisemitic, and the story mentions the Dreyfus affair and explores the issues of "being Jewish in 1896 London".

The Riddle of the River explores "the theatre world, the late 19th century craze for séances, [and] the Marconi revolution which will lead to the invention of the telegraph".

Finally, Fatal Inheritance explores "the importance of heredity and how it might influence the nation's health; Dr Freud's latest theories; and . . . the dubious 'science' of eugenics".

Schneps has also published one non-fiction book as Shaw, a guide to solving Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles.

Seminars and lectures

File:Leila Schneps giving a lecture.jpg

Schneps frequently lectures and presents at mathematics conferences and seminars. In 2004 she gave talks on the Grothendieck–Teichmuller group, on curve complexes, tensor categories, and fundamental groupoids, and on Lie algebras, at a workshop at the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto; she gave a series of lectures on Grothendieck–Teichmüller theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012; and she presented talks on Grothendieck–Teichmüller theory, Lie algebras, and moduli spaces of curves in 2009 and 2013 at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. As part of the 2014 Sampson Lectures at Bates College, she gave a technical talk on Multiple Zeta Values and a general-level talk based on her book Math on Trial.

Activism

Schneps promotes public awareness of the importance of the proper use of mathematics and statistics in criminal proceedings. In addition to her book on the subject, she has written newspaper articles and she is a member of the Bayes and the Law International Consortium.

External links

• Website