TERENCE TAO

'Terence Chi-Shen Tao' (陶哲軒) (born July 17 1975, Adelaide, South Australia) is an Australian mathematician working primarily on harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, combinatorics, analytic number theory and representation theory.
A child prodigy, Tao is currently a professor of mathematics at UCLA. He was promoted to a full professor at age 24.^[1] In August 2006, he was awarded the Fields Medal.^[2] Just one month later, in September 2006, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on May 18, 2007.

Contents

Personal life

Child prodigy

Research and awards

References

External links

Personal life

Both Tao's parents are Chinese by ethnicity. His parents are first generation immigrants from Hong Kong to Australia.^[3] His father, Billy Tao (Chinese name Xiangguo ; Cantonese Yale: tòuh jeuhng gwok; Pinyin: Táo Xiàngguó) is a pediatrician, and his mother is a Physics and Mathematics graduate from The University of Hong Kong, was formerly a secondary school teacher of Mathematics in Hong Kong. ^[4] She was reportedly also an exceptional mathematician.[1]
His father told the press that at the age of two, during a family gathering, the infant Tao taught a 5-year-old child mathematics and English. When asked by his father why he knew numbers and letters, he said he learned them from ''Sesame Street''.^[5] Aside from English, Tao speaks Cantonese, but does not write Chinese. He currently lives with his wife and son in Los Angeles, California. Tao has two brothers.

Child prodigy

Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age. Tao attended 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 (he scored a 760).^[6] 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 won the gold medal when he just turned thirteen and remains the youngest gold medalist in the tournament's history. At age 14, Tao attended the Research Science Institute. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees (at the age of 17) 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 20.^[7] He joined UCLA's faculty that year.

Research and awards

He received the Salem Prize in 2000, the Bôcher 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:^[8][9] For this and other work, he was awarded the Australian Mathematical Society Medal.
In 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, he became one of the youngest, the first Australian, and the first UCLA faculty member ever to be awarded a Fields Medal. An article by ''New Scientist''^[10] writes of his ability:
Tao was a finalist to become Australian of the Year in 2007.^[11]

References

1. Terence Tao: The "Mozart of Math" www.college.ucla.edu, 9 November 2005. Retrieved 31 August 2006.
2. IMU Prizes 2006 29 August 2006
3. ''Wen Wei Po'', Page A4, 24 August, 2006.
4. ''Oriental Daily'', Page A29, 24 August, 2006.
5. ''Apple Daily'', Page A4, 24 August, 2006.
6. Radical acceleration in Australia: Terence Tao Gross, M. Retrieved 31 August 2006
7. It's prime time as numbers man Tao tops his Field Stephen Cauchi, 23 August 2006. Retrieved 31 August 2006.
8. Journeys to the Distant Fields of Prime
9. Corrections: For the Record
10. ''NewScientist.com'', Prestigious Fields Medals for mathematics awarded, 22 August, 2006.
11. National Australia Day Committee, 2007 Australian of the Year Finalists, retrieved 2007-01-27.



★ 2006 Terence Tao: '' Solving Mathematical Problems '' Oxford University Press.

External links

★ Terence Tao's home page

★ Tao's research blog

★ Bocher Prize Announcement

★ Clay Research Award Announcement

★ Winners of the Levi L. Conant prize

★ 2006 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize Announcement

★ math.NT/0404188 - Preprint on arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions on primes

★ Australian wins highest maths prize, by Charisse Ede, August 22, 2006, from AAP

★ BBC story

★ New York Times story

★ Journeys to the Distant Fields of Prime, New York Times, Kenneth Chang, March 13, 2007

★ Daily Princetonian story

★ Mozart of Maths, Sydney Morning Herald, Deborah Smith, August 26, 2006.

★ Maths Architect of Beauty, Seed Magazine, by Jordan Ellenberg, Posted September 21, 2006

★ Radical acceleration in Australia: Terence Tao, G/C/T, Prufrock Press July/August 1986

★ Main page of Dispersive PDE Wiki, originally hosted, and largely written by Tao.

★
★ About the Dispersive Wiki

★ Terence Tao Appointed to UCLA’s James and Carol Collins Chair

★ Election to the Royal Society

★ Main page of Dispersive PDE Wiki