Akshay Venkatesh FRS (born 21 November 1981) is an Indian Australian mathematician and a professor (since 15 August 2018) at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study.

[9] Akshay Venkatesh was born in Delhi, India, and his family emigrated to Perth in Western Australia when he was two years old.

Venkatesh completed the four-year course in three years and became, at 16, the youngest person to earn First Class Honours in pure mathematics from the university.

[16] Akshay commenced his PhD at Princeton University in 1998 under Peter Sarnak, which he completed in 2002,[2] producing the thesis Limiting forms of the trace formula.

"[3][21] The prize was presented at the International Conference on Number Theory and Modular Forms, held at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, Ramanujan's hometown.

"[22] For his exceptionally wide-ranging, foundational and creative contributions to modern number theory, Venkatesh was awarded the Infosys Prize in Mathematical Sciences[23] in 2016.

"[25] In 2018, he was awarded the Fields Medal,[5][26] commonly described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics,[27] becoming the second Australian (after Terence Tao)[7] and the second person of Indian descent (after Manjul Bhargava)[8] to be so honoured.

"[6] University of Western Australia Professor Michael Giudici said of his former classmate's work that "[i]f it was easy for me to explain, then he wouldn't have received the Fields Medal".

[28] The long citation for his Fields Medal describes Venkatesh as having "made profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects in mathematics" and recognises that he "solved many longstanding problems by combining methods from seemingly unrelated areas, presented novel viewpoints on classical problems, and produced strikingly far-reaching conjectures.