Terence Tao is an Australian-American mathematician who has made significant contributions to the subject. ‘Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science’ and ‘Fellow of the Royal Society’ are among his honors. Tao’s passion in mathematics began in childhood, and he has been successful as a result of his efforts since he was ten years old. Only Tao and another mathematician, Lenhard Ng, have scored higher than 700 on the SAT Math portion. His famous works include the ‘Green-Tao theorem,’ ‘Tao’s inequality,’ ‘Kakeya Conjecture,’ and ‘Horn Conjecture.’ Over the years, Tao has received numerous prizes and published a number of books. He is currently working on geometric combinatorics, harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinators, compressed sensing, and analytic number theory, among other disciplines of mathematics. In addition, he is a professor at UCLA’s Department of Mathematics. In addition to teaching, he is a member of UCLA’s ‘Analysis Group’ and an editor for a number of mathematical journals.
Childhood and Adolescence
Terence Tao was born in Adelaide, Australia, on July 17, 1975. Dr. Billy Tao, his father, is a paediatrician, and Grace, his mother, was a mathematics and physics teacher in Hong Kong. Dr. Billy Tao was born in Shanghai and graduated from the University of Hong Kong with an MBBS degree in 1969. Tao’s mother Grace, on the other hand, had graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a first-class honours degree in physics and mathematics.
Trevor and Nigel, Tao’s two brothers, live in Australia. Trevor and Nigel have both competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad for Australia. Tao’s brothers have also made significant contributions to the field of mathematics.
Tao’s parents first noticed that he was different from other children when he was two years old. He’d teach five-year-olds how to spell and add. When his parents questioned him about his abilities, he would say that he picked them up from watching Sesame Street on TV.
When Tao was three and a half years old, his parents decided to enroll him in school. They soon realized, however, that he was not ready for schooling. It was also tough for his teachers to teach a genius like him.
Tao started going to school like other kids when he was five years old. He was a student at Adelaide’s Blackwood High School by the time he was eight years old. Even as a child, he could be seen sitting in the far corner of the room, reading a hardcover book like ‘Calculus.’
Tao began taking classes at Flinders University in Adelaide when he was eleven years old, in addition to his classes at Blackwood High School. His professor at Flinders University was Garth Gaudry. Tao wrote his first study article when he was 15 years old. Flinders University awarded him a bachelor’s degree in 1991 and a master’s degree in 1992.
Terence Tao was granted the University Medal and a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship after completing his master’s degree at Flinders University, which enabled him to conduct research in the United States.
Tao worked as an assistant researcher at Princeton University from 1993 to 1994. In 1995, he received a Sloan Postgraduate Fellowship. For his thesis, ‘Three regularity results in harmonic analysis,’ he received a doctoral degree in June 1996.
Career of Terence
Terence Tao became a faculty member at the University of California after receiving his PhD at the age of 21. He became a full-time professor at UCLA at the age of 24, making him the university’s youngest full-time professor ever.
Tao proved the Green-Tao theorem with Oxford University’s Ben J. Green, which is one of his most well-known works. By 2006, Tao had partnered with 68 co-authors and worked with over 30 others.
Tao got numerous medals and accolades for his Green-Tao theorem. In 2006, he received the Fields Medal as the youngest mathematician and the first UCLA faculty member. He was nominated for Australian of the Year in 2007 for his outstanding work. In the same year, Tao published a new work titled “Tao’s Inequality.”
The circular law conjecture was solved in 2007 by Tao and Van H. Vu, a Vietnamese mathematician from Yale University. Tao proved the Hardy-Littlewood prime tuples conjecture for every linear system of finite complexity in 2010, with the help of Ben Green.
In 2011, he also contributed to the examination of the Erdos-Straus hypothesis. In this paper, he demonstrated that as n approaches infinity, the number of solutions to the Erdos-Straus equation grows polylogarithmically. Tao established in 2012 that any odd integer bigger than 1 is the sum of no more than five primes. He was also named a Simons Investigator in the same year, and he shared the Crafoord Prize with Jean Bourgain.
In 2012, Ben Green and Tao worked together again to prove the Dirac-Motzkin conjecture and the ‘orchard-planting problem.’ In addition, Tao released his first monograph on ‘Higher Order Fourier Analysis.’ In September 2015, Tao proved the Erdos discrepancy problem for the first time, combining entropy estimates with analytic number theory.
Major Projects of Terence
Terrence Tao has made a significant contribution to mathematics. His most famous work, however, is the Green-Tao theorem, which he proved with Ben Green, a long-time partner. Tao was named a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Science as a result of his efforts. He was also made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007. For the Green-Tao theorem, Tao received the Australian Mathematical Society Medal in 2004.
Achievements & Awards
Tao began competing in International Mathematical Olympiads when he was ten years old. He won a bronze medal in 1986, a silver medal in 1987, and a gold medal in 1988, making him the youngest person to win a gold medal in the Mathematical Olympiad.
In 2000, Tao was awarded the Salem Prize, and in 2002, the American Mathematical Society’s Bocher Memorial Prize. In 2003, Tao earned the Clay Research Award, which honors mathematicians for their contributions to the field of mathematics.
He was awarded the ISAAC Award by the International Society of Analysis in 2005, and the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2006. In 2006, he was one of two co-recipients of the Fields Medal. Fields is known as the “Nobel Prize” of mathematicians.
For numerous breakthrough contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations, and analytic number theory, he was awarded the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. Terrence’s Personal Life Tao’s parents met as students at the University of Hong Kong. Tao was born in Australia after they emigrated from Hong Kong.
Laura, his wife, is an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They live in Los Angeles, California, with their son and daughter. With over 300 academic papers and 17 books to his credit, Tao has made a significant contribution to mathematics.
Estimated Net Worth
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