Nina Snaith


Nina Claire Snaith is a British mathematician at the University of Bristol working in random matrix theory and quantum chaos.

Education

Snaith was educated at the University of Bristol where she received her PhD in 2000 for research supervised by Jonathan Keating.

Career and research

In 1998, Snaith and her then adviser Jonathan Keating conjectured a value for the leading coefficient of the asymptotics of the moments of the Riemann zeta function. Keating and Snaith's guessed value for the constant was based on random-matrix theory, following
a trend that started with Montgomery's [pair correlation conjecture]. Keating's and Snaith's work extended works by Brian Conrey, Ghosh, and Gonek, also conjectural, based on number theoretic heuristics; Conrey, Farmer, Keating, Rubinstein, and Snaith later conjectured the lower terms in the asymptotics of the moments. Snaith's work appeared in her doctoral thesis Random Matrix Theory and zeta functions.
Snaith is currently Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Bristol.

Awards and honours

In 2008, Snaith was awarded the London Mathematical Society's Whitehead Prize.
In 2014, she delivered the annual Hanna Neumann Lecture to honour the achievements of women in mathematics.

Personal life

Snaith is the daughter of mathematician and sister of mathematician and musician Dan Snaith, mostly known by his artistic names Manitoba, Caribou, and Daphni.