Akshay Venkatesh is an Indian Australian

Indian Australian

An Indian Australian is an Australian of Indian heritage. They include both those who are Australian by birth, and increasingly, those born in India or elsewhere in the Indian diaspora...

 mathematician

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

. His research interests are in the fields of counting

Counting

Counting is the action of finding the number of elements of a finite set of objects. The traditional way of counting consists of continually increasing a counter by a unit for every element of the set, in some order, while marking those elements to avoid visiting the same element more than once,...

, equidistribution problems in automorphic form

Automorphic form

In mathematics, the general notion of automorphic form is the extension to analytic functions, perhaps of several complex variables, of the theory of modular forms...

s and number theory

Number theory

Number theory is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers. Number theorists study prime numbers as well...

, in particular representation theory

Representation theory

Representation theory is a branch of mathematics that studies abstract algebraic structures by representing their elements as linear transformations of vector spaces, and studiesmodules over these abstract algebraic structures...

, locally symmetric spaces and ergodic theory

Ergodic theory

Ergodic theory is a branch of mathematics that studies dynamical systems with an invariant measure and related problems. Its initial development was motivated by problems of statistical physics....

. He is the only Australian to have won medals at both the International Physics Olympiad

International Physics Olympiad

The International Physics Olympiad is an annual physics competition for high school students. It is one of the International Science Olympiads. The first IPhO was held in Warsaw, Poland in 1967....

 and International Mathematics Olympiad, at the age of 12.
Raised in Perth

Perth, Western Australia

Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....

, Western Australia

Western Australia

Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...

, where he attended Scotch College

Scotch College, Perth

Scotch College , is one of Australia's leading independent schools for boys, situated in Swanbourne, Western Australia, Australia. The school is a member of the Public Schools Association and is now a Uniting Church school, although it was founded in 1897 by the Presbyterian Church of Australia...

, Venkatesh attended extracurricular training classes for gifted students in the state mathematical olympiad program.