New Delhi Born Indian-Australian Wins Fields Medal, The Nobel Equivalent In Mathematics

Indian origin Akshay Venkatesh has been awarded 2018’s Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize equivalent in the field of Mathematics, The Hindu has reported. The award was instituted in 1932 at the request of Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields and is given out every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40. The award includes a prize money of 14,000 Canadian dollars.

Akshay Venkatesh was recognised for his “profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects” in Mathematics. Other three winners of the award are Caucher Birkar, Peter Scholze, Alessio Figalli.

Venkatesh’s citation says that he was awarded ,“For his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory, which has resolved long-standing problems in areas such as the equidistribution of arithmetic objects.”

Akshay Venkatesh moved to Australia with his family when he was two years old. A child prodigy, he graduated with a first class in mathematics from University of Western Australia at the age of 16 earning his PhD at the age of 20. Prior to Fields Medal, he has also won Ostrowski Prize, the Infosys Prize, the Salem Prize and Sastra Ramanujan Prize.