Sarah Hart

Overview

Extended absence from the college

As Professor Emerita I'm rarely in college - if you wish to contact me please do so via my personal website sarahhartauthor.com.

Biography

Fellowships, honours, etc

• President of the Association for Mathematics in Education (AMiE), (2026-7)
  
• Fellow of Birkbeck (from 2024) (citation by College Orator here)
  
• Fellow of Gresham College (from 2024)
  
• President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM) (2021-23)
  
• Winner of the Mathematical Association of America's Euler Prize (2024) for my book Once Upon a Prime
• Member of the London Mathematical Society

Employment

• Acting Provost at Gresham College (March 2025 – December 2025).
• Gresham Professor of Geometry (Summer 2020 – Summer 2024).
• Professor of Mathematics at Birkbeck College, University of London (October 2013 – July 2023). Now Professor Emerita.
• Head of Birkbeck’s Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics (September 2016 – September 2019); a 3-year fixed term role.
• Assistant Dean for retention and widening participation, in the School of Business, Economics and Informatics at Birkbeck (August 2012 – August 2016).
• Lecturer in Mathematics at Birkbeck from September 2004, subsequently promoted to Senior Lecturer (2009) and Reader (2010).
• Temporary Lecturer at UMIST (Sept 2003 – Aug 2004).
  EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Feb 2002 – Aug 2003).
• Postdoctoral Research Post funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Aug 2001 – Jan 2002).
• Occasional Lecturer at UMIST (full time post for 6 months Sept 2000 – Feb 2001).
  

Highlights

• I spent the first two decades of my career as an active research mathematician (PhD in 2000, postdoctoral work and lectureships after that, and promotion to a full professorship in 2013). Ten years later, in 2023, I escaped to become a full-time author and mathematics communicator. I have kept this page live because it's a good place to keep a record of my research and academic career. Have a look at the Research section of this site for more information. For everything else, visit my personal website, my Substack, or LinkedIn.

• My 2023 book "Once Upon a Prime", on the links between mathematics and literature (Flatiron Books US and HarperCollins UK), has been translated into several languages. It won the MAA Euler Prize, was shortlisted for the BSHM Neumann Prize, and was positively reviewed in The New York Times, The Economist, The Sunday Times, The Observer, and The Washington Post, among others.

• I am a mathematics communicator and as well as my writing I often give public lectures at universities, literary festivals and other events. I speak about mathematics across the UK and also internationally, including in the U.S., Canada, Spain, Portugal, China and Korea. If you would like me to speak at your event, please contact me via my personal website.

• Media appearances have included BBC Radio 4 shows "In Our Time",  "Curious Cases", "The Infinite Monkey Cage", with Brian Cox and Robin Ince, and "Start the Week". I've also been a guest on shows for NPR in the U.S., CBC/Radio-Canada, and Freakonomics Radio, along with many podcasts.

• As Gresham Professor of Geometry (2020 - 2024) I gave six free public lectures each year. I was the first woman appointed to this chair since its inception in 1597. As a Fellow of the College I continue to give invited lectures from time to time. All of my lectures for Gresham can be viewed for free online, and are linked from my Gresham College profile page. 

Web profiles

• Personal Website
• Substack "The Patterns Beneath"
• Literary Agent
• LinkedIn
• Wikipedia page

Research

Research overview

List of publications

My focus nowadays is mathematics communication, writing and speaking for a general audience. I do still write the occasional academic paper just for fun, though. A list of all my academic publications is available via my author profile at the zbMATH database, though it can take a few months for new things to appear.

Below is a brief overview of my research interests.

Mathematics, culture and history

I am very interested in mathematics in its broader cultural context. This includes the history of mathematics and the people who have studied it, as well as the links between mathematics, music, art, fiction and other artistic activities. Mathematics fits firmly in with the arts in my philosophy. This of course is in line with the Ancient Greeks, who studied, the quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Arithmetic is number; geometry is number in space, music is number in time, and astronomy is number in space and time. Of course, since mathematics is the language of the universe, it is an indispensable tool in science, but I've always viewed it as a creative art and doing mathematics as more akin to making art, music or poetry.

These interests are now the main focus of my work - mostly in the form of lectures or writing aimed at a general audience, for example my books "Once Upon a Prime: the wondrous links between mathematics and literature" and "5, 6, 7, 8!", on the resonances between mathematics and music. 

Pure mathematics research

My PhD, and the vast majority of my published papers as an academic mathematician, were in the area of abstract algebra known as group theory, a beautiful mathematical tool for studying symmetry, in the widest interpretation of that word. You can look at my list of publications, but I've written lots of papers on Coxeter groups (a particularly nice kind of group if you're interested in symmetry and geometry), as well as commuting involution graphs in various groups, plus some work on sum-free and product-free sets, and most recently playing with the idea of solving equations in groups (starting with finding square roots and cube roots). I may not have won the Fields medal, but I can console myself with the honour of having had a theorem of mine (joint work with Michael Guidici) feature as Theorem of the Day at theoremoftheday.org.

 

 

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

2

Current and recently completed PhD students

• Dan McVeagh (completed 2025)
• Precious Agigor (Commonwealth Scholar, 1 year visiting PhD fellowship 2022)
• Amal Sbeiti Clarke (completed 2018)
• Chimere Anabanti (completed 2017)

(As I am now Professor Emerita, I am not taking on any new further PhD students.) 

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• DAN MCVEAGH

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Jan 2017 to Jun 2023

  Title of thesis:

  Finite groups with many roots.

  Description:

  The quaternion group of order eight has six elements all of which square to the central involution, -1. This means there is a non-identity element whose square roots account for 3/4 of group elements.

  This is the starting point of this research in which I explore this question and the related more general one: given a prime p, which finite groups contain non-identity elements with many pth roots. 

  Awarded:

  2026

• AMAL SBEITI CLARKE

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2014

  Awarded:

  2018

Teaching

During my 19 years at Birkbeckk I taught on both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, as well as MSc Dissertation supervision and PhD supervision.

I designed and taught numerous pure mathematics modules, everything from a first year undergraduate "numbers and proof" course to master's level group theory. One of my favourite courses to teach was one I created and taught from 2020 to 2023: a BSc module called Explorations in Mathematics, where we covered everything from how to find your longitude at sea, to why giants are such weaklings, from the curious history of magic squares, to why the frets on your guitar are not evenly spaced.

Publications

External Repositories

• Zentralblatt Math (ZBMath)
• MathSciNet

Business and community

Media

I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:

• Mathematics
• Mathematics and Literature, Music, Art
• Women in Mathematics/Science