Leila Schneps is an American mathematician and fiction writer at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique working in number theory.

[1] During the late 1990s Schneps also had short-term visiting researcher assignments at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and MSRI at Berkeley.

[24] Targeted at a general audience, the book uses ten historical legal cases to show how mathematics, especially statistics, can affect the outcome of criminal proceedings, especially when incorrectly applied or interpreted.

[24] While not written as a textbook, some reviewers found it suitable for students, as an introduction to the topic and to "get them thinking, talking and even arguing about the issues involved",[25] with another agreeing that, "they have struck the right balance of providing enough mathematics for the specialist to check out the details, but not so much as to overwhelm the general reader",[26] and another finding the book suitable "for parents trying to support teenagers in their studies of mathematics – or in fact, law".

[28] Another suggests the book was influenced by the authors' selection of cases to show a "disastrous record of causing judicial error", thus attributing insufficient weight to the counterbalancing traditionally inherent in legal proceedings—as lawyers attack opposing evidence and experts with their own, and appellate judges write to influence the conduct of trial judges faced with various types of ordinary and expert testimony.

[29] Schneps has produced English-language translations of several French-language books and papers, including Invitation to the mathematics of Fermat-Wiles,[30] Galois theory,[31] A Mathematician Grappling With His Century,[32] Hodge Theory and Complex Algebraic Geometry II,[33] p-adic L-Functions and p-Adic Representations,[34] and Renormalization methods : critical phenomena, chaos, fractal structures.

[40] 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.