This week the audience is lucky to get two blog posts in one weekend. Today’s second half of the dual blog post is about a famous mathematician, Terrance Tao. I have heard of him since my time as an undergraduate student. However, I just found out the extent of his brilliance recently. For those who do not know, he is considered the “Mozarts of Mathematics” because math flows through him. However, recently you may have seen him in online ads for his latest masterclass, where he teaches problem-solving. Today I wanted to discuss his brief biography and what lessons I have taken from his incredible life.
Terrance Tao is an Australian-American Mathematician and is regarded as the most brilliant mathematician alive. He currently works at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been working there since he was TWENTY years old. However, like every professor, he went through the same process to get to his point of success. At age 5, he was academically ahead by a landslide which allowed him to skip many grades. This advancement he felt allowed him to comprehend and use differential Calculus by age 7. During his High school years, which lasted a little longer than usual, he was concurrently enrolled at Flinders University in Adelaide, where Garth Gaudry taught him. At this age he began competing in Mathematics Olympiads and became the youngest gold medal winner at 13 years old. We can already see that from a young age, he had a brilliant mind, but the next seven years were filled with even more incredible feats. At 14, he began full-time university at Flinders University. He was awarded a B.Sc. with Honors in December 1991, completing his undergraduate degree at just 16. He later completed a master’s degree at the same Flinders University within a year and began a Ph.D. at Princeton the following year. For the next three years, he was advised by Elias Stein. He went on to complete his Ph.D., being awarded for his thesis on “Three regularity results in harmonic analysis.”
After schooling, he entered his professorship at UCLA at TWENTY (still crazy). Four years later, he was promoted to a full-time professor and has been a leading contributor in many aspects of mathematics. He is truly a man of incredible intelligence. He has been rewarded with the Fields Medal, the highest award you can get as a mathematician. His contributions to the field are something else. He once wrote 54 QUALITY publications in a year, whereas an ordinary professor would be lucky enough to release 1 or 2. I therefore wanted to share an excerpt of some of the contributions he made to the field:
“First, it describes his work with Ben Green on the distribution of prime numbers. They proved the remarkable result that the primes contain arithmetic progressions of any length. To dismiss this fantastic achievement in a single sentence seems silly, but there is much more to say. An area to which Tao has made many contributions is the Kakeya problem. This problem, originally posed in 2 dimensions, asked for the minimum area of a shape in which one can rotate a needle through 180°. The answer is surprising; you can make the area less than any chosen number. Tao has worked on the nn-dimensional Kakeya problem, where the minimum volume can be as small as one chooses. However, the fractal dimension of the shape is unknown. This problem sounds rather specialized, but on the contrary, there are surprising connections to Fourier analysis and nonlinear waves. Another area in which Tao has worked in solving special cases of the equations of general relativity describing gravity. Imposing cylindrical symmetry on the equations leads to the “wave maps” problem where, although it has yet to be solved, Tao’s contributions have led to a great resurgence of interest since his ideas seem to have made a solution possible. Another area where Tao has introduced novel ideas, giving the subject a whole new look, is the theory of the nonlinear Schrödinger equations. These equations have considerable practical applications, and again Tao’s insights have shed considerable light on the behavior of a particular Schrödinger equation.”
Though this biography has been relatively concise and could be shared in much greater detail, I am still determining to what extent people find his fascination, so I will keep it short for the case of my general audience.
As far as I can remember, one of my dreams was to be perceived as a creatively intelligent thinker. Becoming a specialist or a master of a field always had a nice twist, and it’s still a goal I have been chasing. Though it’s a rather strange goal, I have been inspired by people like John Nash and Alan Turing. Dr. Nash is another famous mathematician known for his Nash Equilibrium and contributions to Game theory. For those unaware of John Nash’s story, he was a brilliant mathematician who dealt with Schizophrenia from his early adulthood. Though he faced mental hardships, everyone describes him as having a “beautiful mind” and seeing the world differently than an average person would. Another big inspiration was mathematician/computer scientist Alan Turing, who helped the British government pioneer the technology to decrypt Nazi Germany’s secret communications during World War II. Though his life ended tragically, he was still a big source of inspiration to me. He was regarded as the father of cryptography and computing. Some of his work lives on in the field of artificial intelligence, known as the Turing test, to see if a computer can independently exhibit intelligent behavior like a human being. To this day, no computer has beaten the Turing test, and it has been a good indication that artificial intelligence is not as far as we think it is.
These two mathematicians have been academic inspirations in my life, and it is safe to say that Terrence Tao deserves a seat at this small round table. As I continue to chase my goal of becoing a creatively intelligent thinker, I also wanted to share some of Terrance’s words which I found valuable in a recent interview he did on Youtube. He explains that doing something you love is super important when you pursue an advanced education. While this seems straightforward to some, this is not the case for many. After all, I am still determining if the college system has an inherent big issue. For example, I have met plenty of people who do not enjoy what they study. This typically results in doing a job that they do not love. But Terry credits his success on simply loving what he does, which has often resulted in solving many problems that mathematicians have been stuck on for years. Moving forward, this is an essential lesson because loving what you do may be the only thing you need to sustain happiness for the next \ (X\) amount of years. So I plan to take his advice in preparation for what I plan to do next after schooling.
On top of his words, I also realized through him that you are as far as you will take yourself. Many of us dream significantly about being wealthy or attaining specific achievable goals. However not everyone reaches these goals ever and it is really determined with how much time you put into is what you will get out of it. Though Terrance Tao is an extreme outlier compared to our population, there is no reason why I can’t be like him. Although I don’t know his explicit goals, just being passionate and working hard at somthing you love is something I want to take with me moving forward. And while there are more distractions nowadays, reading his biography has added a source of inspiration for me to chase greatness. I am lucky enough to be in a current field where it is relatively new, so I hope that I can be a significant reason in some minor specialization as to why its important and impactful. This transfer of knowledge and inspiration from people to people is so valuable because you never know whom it will immensely affect. Therefore from today and moving on, I will be more intently with myself and what I can do to make my imprint in today’s world. This blog is a way to share my thoughts and expressions but I really want to work on showing results instead of strictly talking about them. This is another goal added to my plate and I look forward to continue to excel. Thanks for reading and I will catch you again next week.