Norwegian mathematician
Nina Holden is a Norwegian mathematician interested in probability theory and stochastic processes, including graphons, random planar maps, the Schramm–Loewner evolution, and their applications to quantum gravity. She is a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Studies at ETH Zurich, and has accepted a position as an associate professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University beginning in 2021.[1][2]
Education
As a student at Berg Upper Secondary School in Oslo, Norway,[3] Holden became the first woman to win the Abel competition, Norway's national Mathematical Olympiad.[4] She competed in 2005 in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where she earned an honorable mention with one of the two top scores on the Norwegian team.[5]
She became a student at the University of Oslo in Norway, where she earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computational science in 2008 and a master's degree in applied mathematics in 2010. While a student in Oslo, she also visited the University of Oxford from 2006 to 2007.[1]
After three years of work as an energy market analyst, she went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate study,[1][4] and completed her Ph.D. there in 2018.[1] Her dissertation, Cardy embedding of random planar maps and a KPZ formula for mated trees, was supervised by Scott Sheffield.[1][6]
Recognition
In association with the 2021 Breakthrough Prizes, Holden was awarded one of three 2021 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes, for early-career achievements by a woman mathematician.[2][7] The citation reads: "for work in random geometry, particularly on Liouville Quantum Gravity as a scaling limit of random triangulations." The particular work refers to her joint work with Xin Sun on the convergence of uniform triangulations under a conformal embedding. The other two winners of the prize were Urmila Mahadev and Lisa Piccirillo.[7]
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