Leila Schneps facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Leila Schneps
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| Pen name | Catherine Shaw |
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| Nationality | American |
| Education | PhD |
| Alma mater | University of Paris |
| Subject | Mathematics |
| Children | Coralie Colmez |
Leila Schneps is an American mathematician and fiction writer at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique working in number theory. Schneps has written general audience math books and, under the pen name Catherine Shaw, has written mathematically themed murder mysteries.
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Education
Schneps earned a B.A. in Mathematics, German Language and Literature from Radcliffe College in 1983. She completed a Doctorat de Troisième Cycle in Mathematics at Université Paris-Sud XI-Orsay in 1985 under the supervision of John H. Coates with a thesis on 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. 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.
Grothendieck Circle
Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck 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and maintains the Grothendieck Circle website, a repository of information regarding Grothendieck, including his own unpublished writings.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.
Fiction writing
In 2004, Schneps published (as Catherine Shaw) 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 actually 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 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".
- 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".
As Shaw, Schneps has also published a non-fiction guide to solving Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles.
Activism
Schneps promotes public awareness of the importance of the proper use of mathematics and statistics in criminal proceedings. Schneps is a member of the Bayes and the Law International Consortium.
Personal life
Coralie Colmez is the daughter of Schneps and Pierre Colmez.
