Akshay Venkatesh: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

Akshay Venkatesh (born 1981) is an Australian mathematician and a professor (since 15 August 2018) at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.

He was the first Australian to have won medals at both the International Physics Olympiad and International Mathematical Olympiad, which he did at the age of 12. In 2018, he was awarded the Fields Medal for his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory. He is the second Australian and the second person of Indian descent to win the Fields Medal. He was on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2020.