Ruth Lawrence

Ruth Elke Lawrence-Neimark, born on 2 August 1971, is a British-Israeli mathematician and professor at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working in knot theory and algebraic topology. She is also well known as a child prodigy: she passed an O-level in mathematics at nine, joined St Hugh's College, Oxford at twelve, graduated with a first-class degree at thirteen, and completed a DPhil in 1989 at seventeen under Sir Michael Atiyah with a thesis on homology representations of braid groups. After a junior fellowship at Harvard and an associate professorship at the University of Michigan she moved to Jerusalem in 1999. Her 1990 paper on homological representations of the Hecke algebra introduced the Lawrence-Krammer representations of the braid group, whose faithfulness was later proved by Daan Krammer and Stephen Bigelow, showing that braid groups are linear. She became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012.