45 Facts About Terence Tao

Terence Tao's research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing and analytic number theory.

Terence Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006 and won the Royal Medal and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014, and is a 2006 MacArthur Fellow.

Terence Tao has been the author or co-author of over three hundred research papers, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians.

Terence Tao's parents are first generation immigrants from Hong Kong to Australia.

Terence Tao's father, Billy Terence Tao, was a Chinese paediatrician who was born in Shanghai and earned his medical degree from the University of Hong Kong in 1969.

Terence Tao's mother, Grace Leong, was born in Hong Kong; she received a first-class honours degree in mathematics and physics at the University of Hong Kong.

Terence Tao was a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics in Hong Kong.

Terence Tao has two brothers, Trevor and Nigel, who are currently living in Australia.

Furthermore, Trevor Terence Tao has been representing Australia internationally in chess and holds the title of Chess International Master.

Terence Tao is married to Laura Terence Tao, an electrical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Terence Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9.

Terence Tao is one of only three 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 eight years old; Tao scored a 760.

Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, stated that Terence Tao had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching.

Terence Tao was the youngest participant to date in the International Mathematical Olympiad, first competing at the age of ten; in 1986,1987, and 1988, he won a bronze, silver, and gold medal, respectively.

Terence Tao remains the youngest winner of each of the three medals in the Olympiad's history, having won the gold medal at the age of 13 in 1988.

At age 14, Terence Tao attended the Research Science Institute, a summer program for secondary students.

From 1992 to 1996, Terence Tao was a graduate student at Princeton University under the direction of Elias Stein, receiving his PhD at the age of 21.

Terence Tao is known for his collaborative mindset; by 2006, Tao had worked with over 30 others in his discoveries, reaching 68 co-authors by October 2015.

Many other results of Terence Tao have received mainstream attention in the scientific press, including:.

Terence Tao has resolved or made progress on a number of conjectures.

In 2012, Green and Terence Tao announced proofs of the conjectured "orchard-planting problem," which asks for the maximum number of lines through exactly 3 points in a set of n points in the plane, not all on a line.

In 2020, Terence Tao proved Sendov's conjecture, concerning the locations of the roots and critical points of a complex polynomial, in the special case of polynomials with sufficiently high degree.

Terence Tao has won numerous mathematician honours and awards over the years.

Terence Tao is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Mathematical Society.

Terence Tao has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, Popular Science, and many other media outlets.

In 2014, Terence Tao received a CTY Distinguished Alumni Honor from Johns Hopkins Center for Gifted and Talented Youth in front of 979 attendees in 8th and 9th grade that are in the same program from which Terence Tao graduated.

In 2021, President Joe Biden announced Terence Tao had been selected as one of 30 members of his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a body bringing together America's most distinguished leaders in science and technology.

In 2021, Terence Tao was awarded the Riemann Prize Week as recipient of the inaugural Riemann Prize 2019 by the Riemann International School of Mathematics at the University of Insubria.

Terence Tao was a finalist to become Australian of the Year in 2007.

From 2001 to 2010, Terence Tao was part of a collaboration with James Colliander, Markus Keel, Gigliola Staffilani, and Hideo Takaoka.

Michael Christ, Colliander, and Terence Tao developed methods of Carlos Kenig, Gustavo Ponce, and Luis Vega to establish ill-posedness of certain Schrodinger and KdV equations for Sobolev data of sufficiently low exponents.

Terence Tao built upon earlier innovations of Daniel Tataru, who considered wave maps valued in Minkowski space.

Terence Tao proved the global well-posedness of solutions with sufficiently small initial data.

The fundamental difficulty is that Terence Tao considers smallness relative to the critical Sobolev norm, which typically requires sophisticated techniques.

Bent Fuglede introduced the Fuglede conjecture in the 1970s, positing a tile-based characterisation of those Euclidean domains for which a Fourier ensemble provides a basis of Terence Tao resolved the conjecture in the negative for dimensions larger than 5, based upon the construction of an elementary counterexample to an analogous problem in the setting of finite groups.

In collaboration with Ana Vargas and Luis Vega, Terence Tao made some foundational contributions to the study of the bilinear restriction problem, establishing new exponents and drawing connections to the linear restriction problem.

In 2003, Terence Tao adapted ideas developed by Thomas Wolff for bilinear restriction to conical sets into the setting of restriction to quadratic hypersurfaces.

In collaboration with Emmanuel Candes and Justin Romberg, Terence Tao has made notable contributions to the field of compressed sensing.

Candes and Terence Tao abstracted the problem and introduced the notion of a "restricted linear isometry," which is a matrix that is quantitatively close to an isometry when restricted to certain subspaces.

Candes and Terence Tao considered relaxations of the sparsity condition, such as power-law decay of coefficients.

Bourgain, Katz, and Terence Tao provided a quantitative formulation of this fact, showing that for any subset of such a field, the number of sums and products of elements of the subset must be quantitatively large, as compared to the size of the field and the size of the subset itself.

Green and Terence Tao showed that one can use a "transference principle" to extend the validity of Szemeredi's theorem to further sets of integers.

In 2010, Green and Terence Tao gave a multilinear extension of Dirichlet's celebrated theorem on arithmetic progressions.

The proof of Green and Terence Tao was incomplete, as it was conditioned upon unproven conjectures.

Terence Tao won the Fields Medal, the highest award of mathematics, in 2006.