Akshay Venkatesh, an associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has been named a recipient of a 2007 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. Venkatesh, 25, was one of 20 scientific researchers to receive a fellowship. Each fellow receives an unrestricted research grant of $625,000 over five years.
Akshay Venkatesh, an associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has been named a recipient of a 2007 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. Venkatesh, 25, was one of 20 scientific researchers to receive a fellowship. Each fellow receives an unrestricted research grant of $625,000 over five years.
Venkatesh’s research is in number theory: the arithmetic of whole numbers. His scholarship focuses on mathematical objects, called L-functions, which encode the behavior of prime numbers. The study of prime numbers has been a central concern of mathematics since ancient times, and the idea that their properties can be studied via L-functions arose in the 19th century. Yet the properties of L-functions remain, by and large, mysterious. Venkatesh is developing a suite of techniques to study L-functions from the analytic viewpoint-he is seeking to offer a new lens with which to study L-functions and new insights into the underlying structures.
In August, Venkatesh was awarded the 2007-2008 Salem Prize, which is awarded every year to a young mathematician judged to have done outstanding work in the theory of Fourier series, an infinite series used to solve differential equations. The prize committee noted Venkatesh’s contributions to applications to classical and modern problems in number theory in its announcement of the award, which was established in 1968.
Born in New Dehli 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 Math Research Fellowship, a Hackett fellowship, and the J.A. Woods Memorial Prize. Prior to coming to NYU in 2005, Venkatesh held at C.L.E. Moore Instructorship at MIT.