Terence Tao
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Categories: 1975 births | 20th century mathematicians | 21st century mathematicians | Australian mathematicians | Combinatorists | Fields Medalists | Fellows of the Royal Society | Living people | MacArthur Fellows | Number theorists | People from Adelaide | People from Los Angeles | Princeton University alumni | University of California, Los Angeles faculty | Chinese Americans | Chinese Australians
Terence Chi-Shen Tao (陶哲軒) (born 17 July 1975, Adelaide, South Australia) is an Australian mathematician working primarily on harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, combinatorics, analytic number theory and representation theory. His single most famous result is a proof, in joint work with Ben Green, that there exist arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers. Tao is currently a professor of mathematics at UCLA. In August 2006, he was awarded the Fields Medal.[1] Just one month later, in September 2006, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 18 May 2007.
Personal lifeA child prodigy,[2] Tao was promoted to a full professor at age 24.[3] Both of his parents are Chinese by ethnicity. His parents are first generation immigrants from Hong Kong to Australia.[4] His father, Billy Tao (Chinese name Xiangguo Chinese: 陶象國; 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, formerly a secondary school teacher of Mathematics in Hong Kong. [5] She was reportedly also an exceptional mathematician.[6] 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. According to Smithsonian Online Magazine, Tao taught him self arithmetic by the age of two. When asked by his father why he knew numbers and letters, he said he learned them from Sesame Street.[7] 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 prodigyTao 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 (he scored a 760).[8] 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 medallist 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.[9] He joined UCLA's faculty that year. Research and awardsHe 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:[10][11]
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[12] writes of his ability:
Tao was a finalist to become Australian of the Year in 2007.[13] References
External links
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