Fields Medal winner Akshay Venkatesh was recognised for his work in number theory

“If it was easy for me to explain he wouldn’t have got the Fields Medal for it,” says maths pal of Aussie genius Akshay Venkatesh.

From left, Australian mathematician, Akshay Venkatesh, German mathematician Peter Scholze, and Italian mathematician Alessio Figalli, three of four winners of this year’s Fields Medal, pose with their awards. The medal belonging to the fourth winner, Caucher Birkar, was stolen.

In today’s Higher Ed Daily Brief: Fields Medal winners, coup for UWA

Akshay’s big achievement

Today’s big news is that 36 year old Australian mathematician Akshay Venkatesh is one of four winners of the 2018 Fields Medal, the most distinguished award in mathematics, considered to be the Nobel prize of the field.

What did Akshay do? His main achievement was solving the subconvexity problem for degree two L-functions, according to Michael Giudici, a friend who studied with Akshay as an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia and has now returned there as a professor in pure maths.

However Professor Giudici shrank from explaining in any detail. “If it was easy for me to explain he wouldn’t have got the Fields Medal for it,” he said. “His work gives us a greater understanding of arithmetic and prime numbers in general.”

Amazing backstory

Another of the four who won Fields Medals this year is Caucher Birkar from Cambridge University, whose extraordinary backstory is that he is a Kurdish refugee whose childhood was heavily disrupted by the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. He was the child of farmers and spend a lot of time helping his parents on the farm as he grew up in this chaotic time.

“In many ways it was not the ideal place for a kid to get interested in something like mathematics,” he told The Guardian. He studied maths at the University of Tehran before being granted refugee status in Britain where he did his PhD.

A final twist is that, shortly after the awards ceremony in Rio de Janeiro last night Australian time, his medal went missing and organisers believe it was stolen. Brazilian police are investigating.

Other winners

Alessio Figalli from Swiss university ETH Zurich and Peter Scholze from Bonn University were the other two Fields Medal winners this year. The medal is awarded every four years to two, three or four mathematicians. Australian Terry Tao won it in 2006. The late Maryam Mirzakhani, another Iranian who died tragically young last year, won the Fields Medal in 2014 and was the first female winner.

Boost for UWA

Professor Venkatesh is about to take up an appointment at Princeton University’s Institute of Advanced Study. But the fact that he is an alumni of the University of Western Australia will give the institution a huge boost in the world’s most prestigious research rankings, the Chinese developed Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Since 2012 UWA has been in the ARWU top 100 but never better than 87th. The ARWU awards points for alumni who win either Fields Medals or Nobel prizes. Professor Venkatesh’s win won’t affect this year’s ARWU which will be announced shortly. But from next year UWA’s position in the top 100 will be more assured.