Akshay Venkatesh, a renowned Indian-Australian mathematician, was announced at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union in Rio de Janeiro as one of the four winners of the prestigious Fields Medal, also known as the Nobel Prize of Mathematics for the year 2018. Venkatesh is currently teaching at Stanford University.
The New Delhi-born mathematician was recognised for his use of dynamics theory, which studies the equations of moving objects to solve problems in number theory, which is the study of whole numbers, integers and prime numbers, according to The Guardian.
The Fields Medals are awarded after every four years to the most promising mathematicians under the age of 40 to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement.
The medals and cash prizes are funded by a trust established by J.C.Fields at the University of Toronto, which has been supplemented periodically, but is still significantly underfunded. The discrepancy in 2018 was made up by the University of Toronto and the Fields Institute.
Apart from Venkatesh, Caucher Birkar, a Cambridge University professor of Iranian Kurdish origin; Germany’s Peter Scholze, who teaches at the University of Bonn and Alessio Figalli, an Italian mathematician at ETH Zurich have also won the award.
