TERRY TAO MATH FULL
UCLA promoted him to full professor at age 24. from Princeton University, and he joined UCLA’s faculty that year. Tao, now 31, was 20 when he earned his Ph.D. By 11, he was thriving in international mathematics competitions. He started to learn calculus when he was 7, at which age he began high school by 9 he was already very good at university-level calculus. Tao’s genius at mathematics began early in life.
Along with Tao, the Fields Medal also was presented to Andrei Okounkov, professor of mathematics at Princeton University Grigori Perelman, formerly a Miller Fellow at University of California, Berkeley and Wendelin Werner, professor of mathematics at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay. Like the summer Olympics and the World Cup, the Fields Medal is awarded every fourth year. He combines sheer technical power, an other-worldly ingenuity for hitting upon new ideas, and a startlingly natural point of view that leaves other mathematicians wondering, ‘Why didn’t anyone see that before?’” “He’s a magnet attracting the best students the same way John Wooden attracted outstanding basketball players.” Chan said he is known as “the dean of the university where Terry Tao works.” He described the International Congress of Mathematicians as “the World Cup or Olympics of mathematics.”Ĭhristoph Thiele, UCLA professor and chair of the mathematics department, said outstanding graduate students from as far as Romania and China, as well as throughout the United States, have come to UCLA for the chance to study with Tao.īorn and raised in Adelaide, Australia, Tao was awarded the Fields Medal “for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory.” In honoring Tao, the organization said, “Terence Tao is a supreme problem-solver whose spectacular work has had an impact across several mathematical areas. “The best students in the world in number theory all want to study with Terry,” Chan added. What is also amazing is that Terry is still so young. The way he crosses areas would be like the best heart surgeon also being exceptional in brain surgery. People all over the world say, ‘UCLA’s so lucky to have Terry Tao.’ He has solved important problems in several areas of mathematics that have stumped others for a long time. “Someone like Terry comes along once every few decades. “I’m not surprised,” said Tony Chan, dean of the Division of Physical Sciences and professor of mathematics. Terry can unravel an enormously complicated mathematical problem and reduce it to something very simple.” He’s an incredible talent, and probably the best mathematician in the world right now. Mathematicians with Terry’s talent appear only once in a generation. “Terry is like Mozart mathematics just flows out of him,” said John Garnett, professor and former chair of mathematics at UCLA, “except without Mozart’s personality problems everyone likes him. In the 70 years the prize has been awarded by the International Mathematical Union, only 48 researchers ever have won it. The NYT one is a better piece of writing, but The Age one covers different ground.Terence Tao became the first mathematics professor in UCLA history to be awarded the prestigious Fields Medal, often described as the “Nobel Prize in mathematics,” during the opening ceremony of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid on Aug. And if you want to know more about his childhood and see the way Australians write the word “pediatric,” read this one too. But the online version looks great.Īnyway, go read it.
Unfortunately, in the print edition it’s not very well formatted (too much wall of text, which the NYT Magazine has been doing lately). You find yourself sitting in a room without doors or windows, and you can shout and carry on all you want, but no one is listening. And yet this is what any would-be mathematician must summon the courage to face down: weeks, months, years on a problem that may or may not even be possible to unlock. I loved this quote and also it made me tear up a bit as I was sitting in my windowless office with the door closed taking a break from a problem:Īs a group, the people drawn to mathematics tend to value certainty and logic and a neatness of outcome, so this game becomes a special kind of torture. We talk a lot about analogies (caves or dark rooms with light switches or knives etc.) but this one just goes straight to it (the Devil’s game). It’s the best piece I’ve read that explains math and doing math to non-mathers. That’s really all I have to say about this.
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