Akshay Venkatesh, an associate professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has been awarded the 2007-2008 Salem Prize. The prize is awarded every year to a young mathematician judged to have done outstanding work in Salem’s field of interest—the theory of Fourier series, an infinite series used to solve differential equations.
Akshay Venkatesh, an associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has been awarded the 2007-2008 Salem Prize. The prize was established by the widow of Raphael Salem and is awarded every year to a young mathematician judged to have done outstanding work in Salem’s field of interest—the theory of Fourier series, an infinite series used to solve differential equations.
In its announcement of the award, the prize committee noted Venkatesh’s contributions to applications to classical and modern problems in number theory. The Salem Prize was first awarded in 1968.
Born in New Delhi and raised in Australia, Venkatesh is the only Australian to have won medals at both the International Physics Olympiad and International Mathematics Olympiad at the age of 12. He received his BSc. in mathematics and physics at the University of Western Australia, Perth in 1997 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 2002.
Venkatesh is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Clay Research Fellowship, a Hackett fellowship, and the J.A. Woods Memorial Prize. Prior to coming to NYU in 2005, Venkatesh held a C.L.E. Moore Instructorship at MIT.
EDITOR’S NOTE: New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, a center for research and advanced training in computer science and mathematics, has long been a leader in mathematical analysis, applied mathematics, and scientific computation, with special emphasis on partial differential equations and their applications. In computer science, the Institute excels in theory, programming languages, computer graphics, and machine learning. For more, go to http://cims.nyu.edu/