Akshay Venkatesh: Geometry and the Human. | The TNQ Distinguished Lectures

Professor Venkatesh serves on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, one of the world's foremost centres for fundamental research and scholarship.

His work spans a range of fields in modern mathematics, including number theory, representation theory, topology, ergodic theory, and automorphic forms. He is especially admired for forging deep and unexpected connections between areas of mathematics that had previously seemed unrelated.

About the Speaker

Professor Akshay Venkatesh, a Fellow of the Royal Society and one of the world's most celebrated mathematicians is the recipient of the 2018 Fields Medal. He will be the Featured Speaker for the Second Edition of the TNQ Distinguished Lectures in Mathematics.

Born in New Delhi in 1981 and raised in Perth, Australia, Professor Venkatesh displayed extraordinary mathematical talent from a remarkably young age. He represented Australia at both the International Physics Olympiad and the International Mathematical Olympiad while still a child, becoming one of the youngest medal winners in the history of these competitions.

Professor Akshay Venkatesh has been widely recognised not only for exceptional technical brilliance, but also for the originality and breadth of his mathematical imagination.

Over the course of his distinguished career, Professor Venkatesh has also received many of the world’s leading honours in mathematics, including the Salem Prize, the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, the Infosys Prize in Mathematical Sciences, and the Ostrowski Prize. In awarding him the Fields Medal — widely regarded as the highest honour in mathematics — the International Mathematical Union recognised Professor Venkatesh “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.”