Mathematics professor Akshay Venkatesh wins 2018 Fields Medal

Stanford Mathematics Professor Akshay Venkatesh has been awarded the 2018 Fields Medal. The Fields Medal is one of the highest honors in mathematics, awarded every four years to 2-4 mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of Mathematics. The award recognizes outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and the promise of future achievement. This year’s Congress took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Often described as the “Nobel Prize in Mathematics”, the Fields Medal has been awarded to Stanford Mathematics professors this year and most recently in 2014. Professor Venkatesh joins the first ever female recipient, late Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, who was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014, and previous Stanford recipient, Paul Cohen who won in 1966.

In announcing this year’s Medal winners, the International Mathematical Union praises 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 equidistribution of arithmetic objects.” Furthermore, as Allyn Jackson writes in discussing Venkatesh’s work, “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. . . Only 36 years of age, Venkatesh will continue to be an outstanding leader in mathematics for years to come.”

The other Fields Medal winners this year are Caucher Kirkar (University of Cambridge), Alessio Figalli (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-Zurich), and Peter Scholze (University of Bonn).

Read more about Professor Venktatesh in Stanford News.

For more information on the Fields Medal visit this website.

Read more about the Fields Medal Winners in Quanta Magazine, the New York Times.