Career
With Neil Sloane, she maintains the Online Catalogue of Lattices. She is a professor in the department of mathematics at Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen University. Nebe is known for using integral representations of finite groups to construct explicit examples of discrete mathematical structures using computer algebra systems
Her constructions include extremal even unimodular lattices in 48, 56, and 72 dimensions and an extremal 3-modular lattice in 64 dimensions.
These lattices represent the densest known sphere packings and the highest known kissing numbers in these dimensions. Her discovery of an extremal unimodular lattice in 72 dimensions settled a long open problem.
1995 – Friedrich Wilhelm Prize.