Rate My Professor Akshay Venkatesh

Akshay Venkatesh is a professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he has held the position of Robert and Luisa Fernholz Professor since August 2018. He earned a bachelor's degree with first-class honors in pure mathematics from the University of Western Australia at age 16 and completed his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 2002 under the supervision of Peter Sarnak, with a dissertation titled "Limiting forms of the trace formula." Prior to joining the permanent faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study, Venkatesh held positions including a C.L.E. Moore instructorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Clay Research Fellowship from 2004 to 2006, an associate professorship at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, and a full professorship at Stanford University from 2008 to 2018.

Venkatesh's research focuses on number theory, automorphic forms, representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology. His work synthesizes analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory to address problems such as the equidistribution of arithmetic objects. He has received numerous honors, including the Salem Prize in 2007, the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2008, the Infosys Prize in 2016, the Ostrowski Prize in 2017, and the Fields Medal in 2018. Venkatesh is a Fellow of the Royal Society and was elected to the 2025 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society.