Terence Tao facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Terence Tao FAA FRS
Born	(1975-07-17) 17 July 1975 (age 50) Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Citizenship	Australia United States
Alma mater	Flinders University (BSc, MSc) Princeton University (PhD)
Known for	Partial differential equations, analytic number theory, random matrices, compressed sensing, combinatorics, dynamical systems
Spouse(s)	Laura Tao
Children	2
Awards	Fields Medal (2006) List Salem Prize (2000) Bôcher Memorial Prize (2002) Clay Research Award (2003) Australian Mathematical Society Medal (2005) Ostrowski Prize (2005) Levi L. Conant Prize (2005) MacArthur Award (2006) SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2006) Sloan Fellowship (2006) Fellow of the Royal Society (2007) Alan T. Waterman Award (2008) Onsager Medal (2008) King Faisal International Prize (2010) Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (2010) Pólya Prize (2010) Crafoord Prize (2012) Simons Investigator (2012) Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics (2014) Royal Medal (2014) PROSE Award (2015) Riemann Prize (2019) Princess of Asturias Award (2020) Bolyai Prize (2020) IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal (2021) Global Australian of the Year Award (2022) Grande Médaille (2023) Best Paper Award (2023) Alexanderson Award (2023)
Scientific career
Fields	Harmonic analysis
Institutions	University of California, Los Angeles
Thesis	Three Regularity Results in Harmonic Analysis (1996)
Doctoral advisor	Elias M. Stein
Doctoral students	Monica Vișan

Terence Chi-Shen Tao (born 17 July 1975) is an Australian-American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Many people consider him one of the greatest living mathematicians.

Tao has won many awards for his work. These include the Fields Medal in 2006, which is like the Nobel Prize for mathematics. He also received the Royal Medal and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014.

Life and Achievements

Family and Background

Terence Tao's parents moved to Australia from Hong Kong. His father, Billy Tao, was a children's doctor. His mother, Grace Leong, was a math and physics teacher. Both of his parents studied at the University of Hong Kong.

Terence has two brothers, Trevor and Nigel. Both of them have also been very good at math. They represented Australia in the International Mathematical Olympiad. Trevor Tao is also a Chess International Master.

Terence Tao is married to Laura Tao. She is an electrical engineer who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They live in Los Angeles, California, and have two children.

A Childhood Math Whiz

Terence Tao was a child prodigy, meaning he was extremely talented from a very young age. He skipped five grades in school. By the age of 9, he was already taking university-level math classes!

He was one of only three children in a special program for talented students to score over 700 on the SAT math test at just eight years old. Terence scored an amazing 760. A director of the program said that Terence had the best math reasoning ability he had ever seen.

Tao was also the youngest person to ever compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad. He first joined at age ten. He won a bronze medal in 1986, a silver in 1987, and a gold medal in 1988. He was only 13 when he won the gold medal, making him the youngest gold medalist in the Olympiad's history.

Becoming a Professor

At age 14, Tao attended a special summer program for high school students interested in science. By age 16, he had earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Flinders University in Australia.

In 1992, he moved to the United States to study at Princeton University. He earned his PhD (doctorate degree) at the age of 21. In 1996, he started teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Just three years later, at 24, he became a full professor at UCLA. He is the youngest person ever to reach that rank at the university.

Terence Tao is known for working with many other mathematicians. By 2015, he had worked with over 68 different co-authors on his discoveries.

Solving Big Math Problems

Tao has worked on many different areas of mathematics. He is famous for his work with British mathematician Ben J. Green. Together, they proved the Green–Tao theorem. This theorem shows that you can find very long sequences of prime numbers that are equally spaced apart.

For example, 3, 7, and 11 are prime numbers that are spaced 4 apart. The Green-Tao theorem says that you can always find such a sequence of prime numbers, no matter how long you want the sequence to be.

Tao has also solved or made big progress on many other tough math problems. These include:

• The Erdős discrepancy problem, which is about how evenly numbers can be spread out.
• The Collatz conjecture, a famous problem about a sequence of numbers.
• The "orchard-planting problem," which asks about drawing lines through points.
• Work related to the Riemann hypothesis, another very famous unsolved math problem.

Awards and Honors

Tao at ICM 2006.

Terence Tao has received many important awards for his mathematical work. He is a member of many respected scientific groups, including the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences.

In 2006, he won the Fields Medal. This is one of the highest honors a mathematician can receive. He was the first Australian and the first UCLA professor to win this award. He was also one of the youngest winners ever. That same year, he received a MacArthur Award, sometimes called a "genius grant."

Tao has been featured in major news outlets like The New York Times and CNN. In 2021, President Joe Biden chose him to be part of his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. This group advises the President on important science and technology issues.

Many people admire Tao's wide range of knowledge. Another famous mathematician, Timothy Gowers, said that Tao knows an "extraordinary combination of breadth and depth" in mathematics. He can understand many different math topics very deeply, even those he doesn't officially work on.

Images for kids

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  Tao at the age of 10 with mathematician Paul Erdős in 1985

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  Tao (second from left) with UCLA undergraduate students in 2021

See also

In Spanish: Terence Tao para niños