Akshay Venkatesh

Institute for Advanced Study

Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian mathematician and professor at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, awarded the Fields Medal in 2018 for his profound synthesis of analytic number theory, automorphic forms, ergodic theory, representation theory, and algebraic topology. A child prodigy who finished his undergraduate degree in Australia as a teenager and earned his doctorate at Princeton under Peter Sarnak, Venkatesh held positions at MIT, the Courant Institute at NYU, and Stanford before joining the IAS in 2018. His work is distinguished by importing tools from one mathematical domain to crack long-standing problems in another: he applied dynamics and equidistribution to subconvexity bounds for L-functions and to counting problems for automorphic forms, and developed a far-reaching theory of derived Hecke algebras and motivic cohomology to explain mysterious multiplicities in the cohomology of arithmetic groups. With collaborators including Jordan Ellenberg, Philippe Michel, and Akshay's wider circle of analytic number theorists, he reshaped how equidistribution and representation theory inform the Langlands program. A Fellow of the Royal Society and recipient of the Ostrowski and Infosys prizes, Venkatesh is regarded as one of the most original and wide-ranging number theorists of his generation, and his foundational results continue to guide research at the interface of number theory, geometry, and topology.