Who is Akshay Venkatesh, the Indian-origin winner of ‘Nobel of mathematics’ Fields medal?
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Indian-Australian mathematician Akshay Venkatesh is one of the four winners of mathematics’ prestigious ‘Fields medal’, often known as the Nobel prize for mathematics. The prize was inaugurated in 1932 at the request of Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, who ran the 1924 Mathematics Congress in Toronto. Akshay became the second Australian to win the prestigious award, after Terence Tao in 2006. He is known for his use of dynamics theory, including the equations of moving objects to solve number theory. He has been awarded the Fields Medal for his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory. The medals are awarded every four years to the promising mathematicians under the age of 40. The other three winners are – Caucher Birkar, a Cambridge University professor; Peter Scholze, a teacher at the University of Bonn and Alessio Figalli, a mathematician at ETH Zurich.
From being a child prodigy to winning the Fields Medal, Akshay Venkatesh’s life has been full of achievements and accolades. Here are 10 things to know about the mathematician.
- Akshay was born in Delhi and raised in Perth, Western Australia. His mother is a Computer Science professor at Deakin University.
- In 1993, at the age of 11, he attended training classes in the state mathematical Olympiad program. He participated at the 24th International Physics Olympiad in Williamsburg and won a bronze medal.
- He is the only Australian to have won both the International Physics Olympiad and International Mathematics Olympiad, at the age of 11 and 12 respectively.
- He became the youngest to attend the University of Western Australia, before studying at Princeton. He went straight into second-year mathematics course after he proved he could clear all the exam papers for the first-year subjects.
- He graduated with first class honours in mathematics at the age of 16.
- In 2002, at the age of 20, he earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University. His journey began with holding a post-doctoral position at MIT to a Clay Research Fellow and is now a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.
- Akshay is the second Indian-origin mathematician to win the Fields Medal, after Manjul Bhargava, a Princeton University Professor who won the prestigious award in 2014.
- The Fields medal has been awarded on August 2 in Rio de Janeiro and the citation for his medal highlights his ‘profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects in mathematics’ and ‘strikingly far-reaching conjectures’.
- He has worked at the highest level in number theory, arithmetic geometry, topology, automorphic forms and ergodic theory.
- He has been felicitated with many awards including the Infosys Prize, Sastra Ramanujan Prize, the Ostrowski Prize A. Woods Memorial Prize, the Packard Fellowship and the Salem Prize.