This year's Mahler Lecturer is Akshay Venkatesh, of Stanford University. He will be visiting various Australian universities throughout September and October 2013. (lecture tour)

Biography

Akshay Venkatesh received his PhD in 2002 from Princeton University and his undergraduate degree from The University of Western Australia. His research is in pure mathematics — specifically, in number theory and related areas. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces and ergodic theory. In 2008 he won the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize. This annual prize is for outstanding contributions to areas of mathematics influenced by the genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.

• Public Lecture: Monday 30 September, 19:00 EST;
  Eastern Avenue Auditorium, University of Sydney.
  Two centuries of prime numbers

Abstract: Surprisingly, there have been fundamental new discoveries about prime numbers in the last decade, most recently by Yitang Zhang a few months ago. I’ll survey some of our understanding of prime numbers in a nontechnical fashion, starting with the "music of the primes" — the strange oscillations between regions where primes are more common and more scarce — and concluding with a discussion of Zhang’s discovery: prime numbers must occasionally come very close to one another.

• AustMS Plenary Lecture (AM): Tuesday 1 Oct, ??:00 EST;
  Eastern Avenue Auditorium, University of Sydney.
  TBA