Terence Tao
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 Terence Tao at UCLA |
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| Born | July 17, 1975 |
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| Field | mathematician |
| Known for | harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, combinatorics, analytic number theory and representation theory |
| Notable prizes | Fields Medal (2006) |
Terence Chi-Shen Tao ( 陶哲轩)(born 1975) 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.
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[edit] Personal life
Tao was born July 17, 1975, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. Both Tao's parents are Han Chinese by ethnicity. His parents are first generation immigrants from Hong Kong to Australia.[3] His father Tao Xiangguo (Chinese: 陶象國; Cantonese Yale: tòuh jeuhng gwok; Pinyin: Táo XiangGuo) is a pediatrician, and his mother, a BSc graduate from The University of Hong Kong, was formerly a secondary school teacher of Mathematics in Hong Kong. [4]
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, including Trevor Tao, a top ten Australian chess player, who resides in Adelaide, Australia.
[edit] Child prodigy
Terence 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 Olympiads, 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.
[edit] 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 Terence Tao released a preprint proving the existence of arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers. The New York Times described it this way:[8][9]
| “ | In 2004, Dr. Tao, along with Ben Green, a mathematician now at the University of Cambridge in England, solved a problem related to the Twin Prime Conjecture by looking at prime number progressions — series of numbers equally spaced. (For example, 3, 7 and 11 constitute a progression of prime numbers with a spacing of 4; the next number in the sequence, 15, is not prime.) Dr. Tao and Dr. Green proved that it is always possible to find, somewhere in the infinity of integers, a progression of prime numbers of equal spacing and any length. | ” |
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:
| “ | Such is Tao’s reputation that mathematicians now compete to interest him in their problems, and he is becoming a kind of Mr Fix-it for frustrated researchers. “If you're stuck on a problem, then one way out is to interest Terence Tao,” says Fefferman. | ” |
Terence Tao was a finalist to become Australian of the Year in 2007.[11]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Terence Tao: The "Mozart of Math" www.college.ucla.edu, 9 November 2005. Retrieved 31 August 2006.
- ^ IMU Prizes 2006 29 August 2006
- ^ Wen Wei Po, Page A4, 24 August, 2006.
- ^ Oriental Daily, Page A29, 24 August, 2006.
- ^ Apple Daily, Page A4, 24 August, 2006.
- ^ Radical acceleration in Australia: Terence Tao Gross, M. Retrieved 31 August 2006
- ^ It's prime time as numbers man Tao tops his Field Stephen Cauchi, 23 August 2006. Retrieved 31 August 2006.
- ^ Kenneth Chang. "Journeys to the Distant Fields of Prime", New York Times, March 13, 2007.
- ^ "Corrections: For the Record", New York Times, March 13, 2007.
- ^ NewScientist.com, Prestigious Fields Medals for mathematics awarded, 22 August, 2006.
- ^ National Australia Day Committee, 2007 Australian of the Year Finalists, retrieved 2007-01-27.
- 2006 Terence Tao: Solving Mathematical Problems Oxford University Press.
[edit] 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.
- Terence Tao Appointed to UCLA’s James and Carol Collins Chair
| Fields Medalists |
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1936: Ahlfors • Douglas | 1950: Schwartz • Selberg | 1954: Kodaira • Serre | 1958: Roth • Thom | 1962: Hörmander • Milnor | 1966: Atiyah • Cohen • Grothendieck • Smale | 1970: Baker • Hironaka • Novikov • Thompson | 1974: Bombieri • Mumford | 1978: Deligne • Fefferman • Margulis • Quillen | 1982: Connes • Thurston • Yau | 1986: Donaldson • Faltings • Freedman | 1990: Drinfeld • Jones • Mori • Witten | 1994: Zelmanov • Lions • Bourgain • Yoccoz | 1998: Borcherds • Gowers • Kontsevich • McMullen | 2002: Lafforgue • Voevodsky | 2006: Okounkov • Perelman • Tao • Werner |
Categories: 1975 births | 20th century mathematicians | 21st century mathematicians | Australian mathematicians | Combinatorists | Erdős number 3 | Fields Medalists | Living people | MacArthur Fellows | Number theorists | People from Adelaide | People from Los Angeles | Princeton University alumni | University of California, Los Angeles faculty | Chinese Americans
