Akshay Venkatesh FRS (born 21 November 1981) is an Australian mathematician and a professor (since 15 August 2018) at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study.[1] His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.[2]
He is the only Australian to have won medals at both the International Physics Olympiad and International Mathematical Olympiad, which he did at the age of 12.[3][4]
In 2018, he was awarded the Fields Medal for his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory.[5][6] He is the second Australian[7] and the second person of Indian descent to win the Fields Medal.[8] He was on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2020.[9]