Career
Swart began teaching at the University of Natal in 1962. She was the first person to earn a doctorate in mathematics from Stellenbosch University, in 1971, with a dissertation on the geometry of projective planes supervised by Kurt-Rüdiger Kannenberg. In 1977, her research interests shifted from geometry to graph theory, which she continued to publish in for the rest of her career.
She was the editor-in-chief of the journal Utilitas Mathematica, and has been vice president of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.
In 1996 she became a fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa.