Akshay Venkatesh
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Akshay Venkatesh (born November 21, 1981 in New Delhi, India) is an Australian mathematician of Indian descent who is a Clay Research Math Fellow research at the Clay Mathematics Institute from 2004 to 2006. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces and ergodic theory [1]. He is the only Australian to have won medals at both the International Physics Olympiad and International Mathematics Olympiad, at the age of 12 [2], [3].
[edit] Early years
Raised in Perth, Western Australia, where he attended Scotch College, Venkatesh attended extra-curricular training classes for gifted students in the state mathematical olympiad program [4]. In 1993, whilst aged only 11, he competed at the 24th International Physics Olympiad in Williamsburg, Virginia, winning a bronze medal [5]. The following year in 1994, he switched his attention to mathematics, and after placing second in the Australian Mathematical Olympiad [6], he won a silver medal in the 6th Asian Pacific Mathematics Olympiad [7], before winning a bronze medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad held in Hong Kong that year. He completed his secondary education that year, turning 13 at the end of the year. He entered the University of Western Australia the following year as the youngest ever student at the institution and was awarded First Class Honours in Pure mathematics [8] in 1997, the youngest ever to achieve this feat, as well as being awarded the J. A. Woods Memorial Prize for being the leading graduating student of the year [9].
[edit] Research career
Venkatesh commenced his PhD at Princeton University in 1998 under Peter Sarnak, which he completed in 2002, producing the thesis Limiting forms of the trace formula. He was supported by the Hackett Fellowship for postgraduate study. He was then awarded a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served as a C.L.E. Moore instructor, until his selection as a Clay Research Fellow in 2004. His research interests are the enumeration of arithmetic objects using upper bounds for the number of rational points on algebraic varieties, and also the analytic theory of automorphic forms, with an interest in quantum chaos and geodesic flows, L-functions, and applications to spectral theory and equidistribution in[10].
He is currently an associate professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University [11].
