Akshay Venkatesh
Akshay Venkatesh, a renowned Indian-Australian mathematician, has been awarded the Fields Medal, which is often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics.
The Fields medals are awarded every four years to the most promising mathematicians under the age of 40.
Venkatesh, who made a mark as a child prodigy, is a professor at Stanford University and is set to move to the School of Mathematics of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton on August 15.
He is the second Indian-origin mathematician to win the prize after Manjul Bhargava, a Princeton University professor, who received it in 2014.
The other three winners of the medal awarded every four years usuallyto four mathematicians are Caucher Birkar, 40, of the University of Cambridge; Alessio Figalli, 34, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Peter Scholze, of the University of Bonn.
The prize carries a gold medal and an award of Canadian $15,000.
The prize was inaugurated in 1932 at the request of Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, who ran the 1924 Mathematics Congress in Toronto.
From being a child prodigy to becoming one of the most renowned researchers in the field of mathematics, Venkatesh's journey has been full of achievements and accolades.
He moved to Perth, Australia, with his parents when he was 2.
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 and, now a professor at Stanford University.
Venkatesh has worked at the highest level in number theory, arithmetic geometry, topology, automorphic forms and ergodic theory.
His research has been recognized with many awards, including the Ostrowski Prize, the Infosys Prize, the Salem Prize and Sastra Ramanujan Prize.
(With agency inputs)
