Akshay Venkatesh, a renowned Indian-Australian mathematician, is one of four winners of mathematics’ prestigious Fields medal, known as the Nobel prize for mathematics.
The Fields medals are awarded every four years to the most promising mathematicians under the age of 40. The prize was inaugurated in 1932 at the request of Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, who ran the 1924 Mathematics Congress in Toronto. Each winner receives a 15,000 Canadian-dollar cash prize. At least two, and preferably four people, are always honoured in the award ceremony.
36 years old Venkatesh, is currently teaching at Stanford University. He has won the Fields Medal for his profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects in mathematics. He was born in New Delhi and moved to Perth, Australia, with his parents when he was two years old.
He participated in physics and math Olympiads — the premier international competitions for high school students — and won medals in the two subjects at ages 11 and 12, respectively.
He finished high school when he was 13 and went to the University of Western Australia, graduating with first class honours in mathematics in 1997, at the age of 16.
In 2002, he earned his PhD at the age of 20. Since then, he has gone from holding a post-doctoral position at MIT to becoming a Clay Research Fellow.
Venkatesh has worked at the highest level in number theory, arithmetic geometry, topology, automorphic forms and ergodic theory.
