Lave received a Bachelor's from
Stanford University, and completed her doctorate in
social anthropology at
Harvard University in 1968. She taught at the
University of California, Irvine and is currently a
professor emerita of geography at the
University of California, Berkeley. In 1988, Lave published her first book,
Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. In it, she explores how
arithmetic is used outside of school contexts, with implications for sociological understanding of the relationship between cognition, practice, culture, and society. For instance, she shows that grocery shoppers in
Orange County, California who could successfully do the mathematics needed for comparison shopping were less able to do the same mathematics when they were presented with the same problems in a formal test. The work is considered a critique of
learning transfer theory and challenges the drawing of sharp boundaries between theories of rationality and theories of everyday thought. == Honors and awards ==