Tao’s father, Billy, had taken Terry around the world to meet some of the great mathematicians, to determine if his son had talent. Professor Charles Fefferman *69, himself a Fields Medal recipient, remembers asking 9-year-old Terry Tao these hypotheticals, which are part of a field in mathematics and computer science known as pursuit games, in 1984. Suppose you and the lion can run at exactly the same speed. Suppose you can run faster than the lion. Suppose the lion can run faster than you. Both you and the lion are represented as points in space. IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE TRAPPED in a room with a hungry lion. Understand the problem, understand the data, and write down everything you know. If reconciling this tension has been the work of a lifetime, Tao’s book may provide a useful framework for making the attempt. His career path has been orderly, but the appearance of mathematical genius in society seems random.
Tao’s mind is orderly, but his cluttered office appears random. It is a tension that appears all around him. Many of the problems he has tackled involve the tension between order and randomness. Sitting in his office on a hot summer afternoon, clad in khakis and a royal blue Polo shirt, Tao is friendly and unassuming as he discusses his work. “Terry wrote 56 papers in two years and they’re all high-quality,” his UCLA colleague John Garnett marveled when Tao won the Fields Medal. Now just 44, Tao has published 17 books and more than 300 research papers. Waterman Award, the Royal Society’s Royal Medal, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science’s Crafoord Prize, and the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. The awards and honors have only multiplied: the MacArthur fellowship (often informally called the “genius” grant), the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. The International Mathematical Union, which awards the medal, praised Tao for his breakthroughs in partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis, and additive number theory.
In 2006, when he was 31, Tao won the Fields Medal, which has been described as the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize and is given out only every four years to mathematicians under 40 years of age. He scored 760 on the math portion of the SAT at the age of 9, earned his Ph.D.
Now considered one of the world’s greatest mathematicians, Tao, a professor at UCLA, has been precocious his entire life.
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