Akshay Venkatesh, a 36-year old mathematician of Indian-origin has bagged the prestigious Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro. The award is considered to be a Nobel Prize equivalent in the field of mathematics. The award is given every four years to those who have contributed exceptionally to the field. He is one of the renowned researchers in the field and received this award for profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects in mathematics and his strikingly far-reaching conjectures. Fields Medal: Indian-Origin Akshay Venkatesh Wins ‘Nobel Prize of Mathematics’.

Let us understand more about great professor Akshay Venkatesh:

  • Venkatesh moved to Australia when he was just 2 and was the youngest student to be accepted at the University of Western Australia, at the age of 13. He aced his class and at the age of 20, he had a PhD.  He currently teaches at the Stanford University in Australia. He has also worked with a post-doctoral position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  • Venkatesh has made many contributions to the field of mathematics like-  number theory, automorphic forms, representation theory, locally symmetric spaces and ergodic theory.

  • He is recognised for using dynamics theory which is basically studying moving objects to solve other problems like studying the whole numbers, prime numbers and integers.

  • He had a keen interest in the subject from his school and concentrated more in it after he secured the 2nd rank in the Australian Mathematical Olympiad. In the same year, he also won a bronze medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad.

  • His research has received several awards, Salem Prize, Packard Fellowship, SASTRA Ramanujan Prize. He has also been awarded the  Infosys Prize in Mathematical Sciences.

The Fields award is given to promising mathematicians every four years. The other three winners along with Venkatesh are Caucher Birkar, a Cambridge University professor of Iranian Kurdish origin; Germany’s Peter Scholze, who teaches at the University of Bonn and Alessio Figalli, an Italian mathematician at ETH Zurich.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 02, 2018 03:12 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).