Tamil Nadu - Chennai

SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for Akshay Venkatesh

CHENNAI: The 2008 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize will be awarded to Akshay Venkatesh, Professor of Mathematics, Stanford University.

According to Krishnaswami Alladi, Chair, 2008 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Committee, the annual prize, established in 2005, is for outstanding contribution to the areas of mathematics influenced by Srinivasa Ramanujan.

The $10,000 prize will be given away at the International Conference on Number Theory and Modular Forms, to be held from December 20 to 22, at SASTRA University, Kumbakonam, Ramanujan’s hometown.

Professor Venkatesh has made far-reaching contributions to a wide variety of areas in mathematics, including the number theory, automorphic forms, the representation theory, locally symmetric spaces and the ergodic theory, by himself, and in collaboration with several mathematicians.

Professor Venkatesh provides a very novel and more direct way of establishing sub-convexity in numerous cases, going beyond the foundational work of Hardy-Littlewood-Weyl, Burgess, and Duke-Friendlander-Iwaniec that dealt with important special cases.

His work is destined to be a classic in the analytic theory of automorphic forms. Finally, Professor Venkatesh’s recent work with Manfred Einseidler, Elon Lindenstrauss and Philippe Michel on Duke’s theorem for cubic fields is striking.

Venkatesh’s entry into research began as a PhD student at Princeton in 1998 under Professor Peter Sarnak, one the most versatile and influential mathematicians of our time. In his PhD thesis, Venkatesh realized the first step of a program proposed by Langlands for counting automorphic by analytic methods.

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