US-based professor is only the second Australian to win the prestigious prize

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The Australian mathematician Akshay Venkatesh has won the Fields medal, the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel prize.

He becomes only the second Australian to win the prestigious prize, after Terence Tao in 2006. It is only awarded every four years to up to four mathematicians who are under 40.

Venkatesh 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.

He grew up in Perth and, at 13, became the youngest person to study at the University of Western Australia, where he went straight into second-year maths courses after he proved he could write the exam papers for all the first-year subjects. He earned first-class honours in pure mathematics aged 16 – again the youngest to do so – before studying at Princeton.

His work uses representation theory, which represents abstract algebra in terms of more easily-understood linear algebra, and topology theory, which studies the properties of structures that are deformed through stretching or twisting, like a Möbius strip.

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Speaking in 2016, he described his work as “looking for new patterns in the arithmetic of numbers”.

Receiving his award on Thursday, he said: “A lot of the time when you do math, you’re stuck, but at the same time there are all these moments where you feel privileged that you get to work with it.

“You have this sensation of transcendence, you feel like you’ve been part of something really meaningful.”

Venkatesh, 36, now lives in the US and is a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

One of his early mentors, Prof Cheryl Praeger, said he had always been “extraordinary”.

Praeger, a professor of mathematics at UWA and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, has known Venkatesh since he was 12, and supervised his honours thesis when he was 15.

“At our first meeting, I was speaking with Akshay’s mother, Svetha, while Akshay was sitting at a table in my office reading my blackboard which contained fragments from a supervision of one of my PhD students.

“At Akshay’s request I explained what the problem was. He coped with quite a lot of detail and I found that he could easily grasp the essence of the research.”

This year’s other winners of the Fields medal are Alessio Figalli from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who is Italian, Caucher Birkar from Cambridge, a Kurdish man who came to Britain as a refugee, and Peter Scholze from Bonn University, who is German.