Mathematician Akshay Venkatesh: Jack of all fields, master of one

Mathematics is a young person’s game. There is speculation that the brain’s neural pathways become less plastic over time, limiting the insights of older people. Whatever the reason, the most path-breaking work in maths and physics (which is essentially applied maths), has been done by people under 40. The discipline is studded with prodigies. But even by mathematical standards, Akshay Venkatesh is unusually prodigious. The newly minted Fields medallist emigrated from Delhi to Perth at the age of two, or rather, his parents did. He joined the bachelor’s course in mathematics at the University of Western Australia when he was 13. By then, he had already won several medals at Maths Olympiads. Venkatesh graduated at 16 and completed his PhD from Princeton University at 20. After holding a post-doctorial position at MIT, he was a Clay Research Follow at the Clay Mathematics Institute. The 36-year-old is currently a professor at Stanford, and intends to transfer to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton in a few months. The Australian citizen has won a multitude of awards, including The Infosys Prize, The Ramanujam Prize, and the Ostrowski. But the Fields Medal is considered the equivalent of the Nobel in terms of prestige for pure mathematicians, even though it carries only a nominal cash award of CAD$15,000. The prize was created by Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields in 1936 and is handed out only to mathematicians under 40.