Sarah_B._Hart

Sarah B. Hart

Sarah B. Hart

British mathematician

Sarah B. Hart is a British mathematician specialising in group theory. She is a former professor of mathematics at Birkbeck, University of London where she was the Head of Mathematics and Statistics until 2022.[1]

In 2020, she was appointed to what may be the oldest chair in mathematics in Britain, the Gresham Professor of Geometry in Gresham College. She is the first woman to hold this position "since the chair was established in 1597".[2]

Hart is a keen expositor of mathematics: she has written about the mathematics of Moby-Dick[3][4][5], and her work has been featured in websites like 'Theorem of the Day'.[6]

Education and career

While still in secondary school, Hart published an exploration (undertaken with her sister) into extending Euler's polyhedral formula to four dimensions.[7]

Hart read mathematics as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, and has an MSc in Mathematics from the University of Manchester. Her doctorate, from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST)[1], addressed Coxeter Groups: Conjugacy Classes and Relative Dominance, under the supervision of Peter Rowley.[8]

She remained in Manchester on an EPSRC research fellowship and then a temporary teaching position before obtaining a position as lecturer at Birkbeck in 2004.[9] She was promoted to professor in 2013 and became head of the Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics in 2016.[10]

She was also president of the British Society for the History of Mathematics 2020 to 2023.[11]

Bibliography

Hart, Sarah. "Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature". HarperCollins Publishers UK. Retrieved 2023-04-13.

References

  1. [1]
    "Sarah Hart", Our staff, Birkbeck, University of London, retrieved 2020-02-15
  2. [2]
    Sarah Hart Appointed Gresham Professor of Geometry, Gresham College, 28 April 2020, retrieved 2020-09-06
  3. [3]
    Roberts, Siobhan (6 March 2021), "Triangulating Math, Mozart and 'Moby-Dick'", The New York Times, retrieved 2021-03-07
  4. [4]
    de León, Manuel (3 August 2019), "Las matemáticas de Moby Dick", Matemáticas y sus fronteras (in Spanish), La Fundación para el Conocimiento madri+d
  5. [5]
    Hart, Sarah B (January 2021), "Ahab's Arithmetic: The Mathematics of Moby-Dick", Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 11 (1): 4–32, arXiv:1903.12102, doi:10.5642/jhummath.202101.03, retrieved 2021-03-07
  6. [6]
    A Theorem on Maximal Sum-Free Sets in Groups (PDF), retrieved 2021-03-04
  7. [7]
    Perkins, Sarah (March 1993), "Investigating Four Dimensional Figures", Mathematics in School, 22 (2): 46, retrieved 2021-03-28
  8. [8]
    Sarah B. Hart at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  9. [9]
    Six Questions with: Dr Sarah Hart, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences
  10. [10]
    "Helping girls beat the less than one in a million odds of becoming a female maths professor – Sarah Hart, Professor of Mathematics at Birkbeck, University of London", Womanthology, 22 March 2017
  11. [11]
    About us: People, British Society for the History of Mathematics, retrieved 2020-02-15
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