Education
Raised in Perth, Western Australia, where he attended Scotch College, Venkatesh attended extracurricular training classes for gifted students in the state mathematical olympiad program He completed his secondary education that year, turning 13 at the end of the year.
Career
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. In 1993, whilst aged only 11, he competed at the 24th International Physics Olympiad in Williamsburg, Virginia, winning a bronze medal. Venkatesh commenced his Doctor of Philosophy 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. Since 1 September 2008, he has been a professor at Stanford University.
The $10,000 prize was given at the International Conference on Number Theory and Modular Forms, held at Shanmugha Arts Science Technology and Research Academy University, Kumbakonam, Ramanujan"s hometown. In 2010, he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (Hyderabad).
Akshay Venkatesh has made contributions to a wide variety of areas in mathematics, including number theory, automorphic forms, representation theory, locally symmetric spaces and ergodic theory, by himself, and in collaboration with several mathematicians.
Some samples:
– Using Ergodic methods, Venkatesh, jointly with Jordan Ellenberg, made significant progress on the Hasse principle for integral representations of quadratic forms by quadratic forms. – In a series of join works with Manfred Einsiedler, Elon Lindenstrauss and Philippe Michel, Venkatesh revisited the Linnik ergodic method and solved a longstanding conjecture of Yuri Linnik on the distribution of torus orbits attached to cubic number fields. – Venkatesh also provided a very novel and more direct way of establishing sub-convexity estimates for L-functions in numerous cases, going beyond the foundational work of Hardy-Littlewood-Weyl, Burgess, and Duke-Friedlander-Iwaniec that dealt with important special cases.
This approach eventually resulted in the complete resolution by Venkatesh and Philippe Michel of the sub-convexity problem for GL(1) and GL(2) L-functions over general number fields.