Akshay Venkatesh Biography 
Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian mathematician of Indian origin. In 2018, he was awarded the Fields Medal for his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory. Fields medal is regarded as Nobel Prize in the field of mathematics, and he is only the second mathematician of Indian origin to receive this award after Manjul Bhargava, who won the same in 2014. He is the second Australian to receive this prize too. Salem Prize (2007), SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2008), Infosys Prize (2016) and Ostrowski Prize (2017) are other major honours received by this young mathematician. Akshay is the son of Svetha Venkatesh, the Alfred Deakin Professor in the Faculty of Science, Engineering & Built Environments at Deakin University.
Akshay Venkatesh was born in Delhi in the year 1981. He is of south Indian descend, born into a middle-class Hindu Tamil Brahmin family. At the age of two, his family shifted to Australia and settled at Perth in Western Australia. His mother Svetha Venkatesh is an academician, known for her contributions to the "formulation and extraction of semantics in multimedia data". She is a professor of computer science too. Akshay’s younger days were spent in Australia itself where he completed his school and college education.
Since young he got drawn towards the subject of mathematics and represented his school and college for many talent hunt programs related to mathematics. At the age of 11, he won bronze medal at 24th International Physics Olympiad in Williamsburg, Virginia 1993. The following year he won second at the Australian Mathematical Olympiad, bronze medal at International Mathematics Olympiad and a silver medal in the 6th Asian Pacific Mathematics Olympiad. At the age of 16, he became the youngest person to earn of First Class Honours in pure mathematics from the University. He completed his PhD at Princeton University in 2002 under the guidance of Peter Sarnak. Since then he is fully associated with his research works and academic career.
Published: August 13, 2018
Updated: August 13, 2018
