Victoria Ruth Neale (March 1984 – 3 May 2023)^[2] was a British mathematician and writer. She was Whitehead Lecturer at Oxford's Mathematical Institute and Supernumerary Fellow at Balliol College.^[3][4] Her research specialty was number theory. The author of the 2017 book Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers,^[5][6] she was interviewed on several BBC radio programs as a mathematics expert.^[7][8] In addition, she wrote for The Conversation and The Guardian.^[9][10] Her other educational and outreach activities included lecturing at the PROMYS Europe high-school program^[11] and helping to organize the European Girls' Mathematical Olympiad.^[12]

Neale was born in 1984.^[13] She obtained her PhD in 2011 from the University of Cambridge. Her thesis work, supervised by Ben Joseph Green, concerned Waring's problem.^[3][1] She then taught at Cambridge while being Director of Studies in mathematics at Murray Edwards College,^[12][14] before moving to Oxford in the summer of 2014.^[15]

Neale died on 3 May 2023, at the age of 39.^[16] She had been diagnosed with a rare type of cancer in 2021.^[17]