Princeton alumnus Venkatesh wins Fields Medal in mathematics
Akshay Venkatesh (center), a 2002 graduate alumnus of Princeton and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), is one of four winners of the 2018 Fields Medal, widely considered the Nobel Prize in mathematics. At left is Peter Sarnak, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton and a mathematics professor at IAS. At right is Avi Wigderson, the Herbert H. Maass Professor at IAS and a 1983 graduate alumnus of Princeton.
Akshay Venkatesh, a Princeton Graduate School alumnus, is one of four recipients of the 2018 Fields Medal, widely considered the Nobel Prize of the mathematics world.
Venkatesh, a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in the town of Princeton, earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 2002. He was awarded the medal “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.”
When describing his work, the International Mathematical Union said, “Most mathematicians are either problem-solvers or theory-builders. Akshay Venkatesh is both. What is more, he is a number theorist who has developed an unusually deep understanding of several areas that are very different from number theory.”
The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to researchers under 40 to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement and the promise of future achievement.
