Ruth Lawrence

Born in 1971, British mathematician and former child prodigy Ruth Lawrence made many headlines in 1985 when, aged just 13, she obtained a bachelor s degree in mathematics from Oxford University, gaining a starred first. Another degree, this time in physics, followed in 1986, and in 1989 she received her D.Phil. in mathematics, again from Oxford. In 1990 she was made a junior fellow at Harvard. And after a stint at the University of Michigan, she took on an associate professorship there in 1997. Lawrence is currently an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem s Einstein Institute of Mathematics and investigates algebraic topology and knot theory. In 1997 Charles Arthur wrote in The Independent, The branch of mathematics she is now researching