Terence "Terry" Chi-Shen Tao FAA FRS, is an Australian mathematician working in harmonic
analysis, partial differential equations, additive combinatorics, ergodic Ramsey theory,
random matrix theory, and analytic number theory.
He currently holds the James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at the University of
California, Los Angeles where he became the youngest person ever promoted to full professor
at the age of 24 years.
He was a co-recipient of the 2006 Fields Medal and the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.
Personal life Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities
from an early age, attending university level mathematics courses at the age of nine.
He is one of only two children in the history of the Johns Hopkins' Study of Exceptional
Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while
just 8 years old.
In 1986, 1987, and 1988, Tao was the youngest participant to date in the International Mathematical
Olympiad, first competing at the age of ten, winning a bronze, silver, and gold medal respectively.
He remains the youngest winner of each of the three medals in the Olympiad's history,
winning the gold medal shortly after his thirteenth birthday.
At age 14, Tao attended the Research Science Institute.
When he was 15 he published his first assistant paper.
He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Flinders University under Garth Gaudry.
In 1992 he won a Fulbright Scholarship to undertake postgraduate study in the United
States.
From 1992 to 1996, Tao was a graduate student at Princeton University under the direction
of Elias Stein, receiving his Ph.D. at the age of 21.
He joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1996.
When he was 24, he was promoted to full professor at UCLA and remains the youngest person ever
appointed to that rank by the institution.
Tao's father was born and grew up in Shanghai, and Tao's mother is Cantonese by ethnicity.
His parents are first generation immigrants from Hong Kong to Australia.
His father, Billy Tao is a pediatrician, and his mother, Grace Tao, is a physics and mathematics
graduate from the University of Hong Kong, formerly a secondary school teacher of mathematics
in Hong Kong.
Tao has two brothers living in Australia, both of whom represented Australia at the
International Mathematical Olympiad.
Nigel Tao was part of the team at Google Australia that created Google Wave.
He now works on the Go programming language.
Trevor Tao has a double degree in mathematics and music and will soon be featured in a book
on autistic savants.
Tao, his wife Laura, their son, and their daughter live in Los Angeles, California.
Research and awards Tao has won numerous honors and awards.
He received the Salem Prize in 2000, the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 2002, and the Clay Research
Award in 2003, for his contributions to analysis including work on the Kakeya conjecture and
wave maps.
In 2005, he received the American Mathematical Society's Levi L. Conant Prize with Allen
Knutson, and in 2006 he was awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize.
In 2004, Ben Green and Tao released a preprint proving what is now known as the Green–Tao
theorem.
This theorem states that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers.
The New York Times described it this way: For this and other work Tao was awarded the
Australian Mathematical Society Medal of 2004.
In August 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, he became
one of the youngest persons, the first Australian, and the first UCLA faculty member ever to
be awarded a Fields Medal.
An article by New Scientist writes of his ability:
Tao was a finalist to become Australian of the Year in 2007.
He is a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Science, and in 2007 was elected
as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
In the same year Tao also published Tao's inequality, an extension to the Szemerédi
regularity lemma in the field of information theory.
In April 2008, Tao received the Alan T. Waterman Award, which recognizes an early career scientist
for outstanding contributions in their field.
In addition to a medal, Waterman awardees also receive a $500,000 grant for advanced
research.
In December 2008, he was named the Lars Onsager lecturer of 2008, for "his combination of
mathematical depth, width and volume in a manner unprecedented in contemporary mathematics".
He was presented the Onsager Medal, and held his Lars Onsager lecture entitled "Structure
and randomness in the prime numbers" at NTNU, Norway.
Tao was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.
In 2010, he received the King Faisal International Prize jointly with Enrico Bombieri.
Also in 2010, he was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics and the Polya Prize.
Tao and Van H. Vu solved the circular law conjecture.
Tao also made contributions to the study of the Erdős–Straus conjecture in 2011 by
showing that the number of solutions to the Erdős–Straus equation increases polylogarithmically
as n tends to infinity.
In 2012 he and Jean Bourgain received the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics from the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Also, in 2012, he was selected as a Simons Investigator.
He proved that every odd integer greater than 1 is the sum of at most five primes.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy
of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Mathematical
Society.
In 2006, he received the Fields Medal "for his contributions to partial differential
equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory", and in 2006,
he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.
He has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, Popular Science, and many
other media outlets.
As of 2013 Tao has published over 250 research papers and 17 books.
He has an Erdős number of 2.
Book publications Solving Mathematical Problems: A Personal
Perspective, Oxford University Press, 2006 Analysis, Vols I and II, Hindustan Book Agency,
2006 Additive Combinatorics, with Van H. Vu, Cambridge
University Press, 2006 Nonlinear dispersive equations: local and
global analysis, CBMS regional series in mathematics, 2006.
Structure and Randomness: pages from year one of a mathematical blog, American Mathematical
Society.
2008 Poincaré's legacies: pages from year two
of a mathematical blog, Vols.
I and II, American Mathematical Society, 2009 An Introduction to Measure Theory, American
Mathematical Society, 2011 An Epsilon of Room, I: Real Analysis: pages
from year three of a mathematical blog, American Mathematical Society, 2011
An Epsilon of Room, II: pages from year three of a mathematical blog, American Mathematical
Society, 2011 An Introduction to Measure Theory.
American Mathematical Society, 2011, Topics in Random Matrix Theory, American Mathematical
Society, 2012 Higher-order Fourier Analysis, American Mathematical
Society, 2012 Compactness and Contradiction, American Mathematical
Society, 2013 See also
Arithmetic combinatorics Circular law
Green–Tao theorem Influence of non-standard analysis
Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness Tao's inequality
Twin prime conjecture References
External links Terence Tao's home page
Tao's research blog Beautiful minds THE AUSTRALIAN 11 August 2007
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Terence Tao", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive,
University of St Andrews . Terence Tao at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
Terence Tao's entry in the Numericana Hall of Fame
Terence Tao's results at the International Mathematical Olympiad