🇦🇺Terence
Tao

He was two years old when he began teaching himself arithmetic from Sesame Street segments and children's books, correcting the sums his older cousins wrote on a blackboard. His parents — Billy Tao, a pediatrician, and Grace Leong, a mathematics graduate — recognized what they were seeing but approached it with the calm that characterizes people who understand the difference between nurturing a gift and weaponizing it. Terence Tao grew up in Adelaide, Australia, with parents who believed in letting remarkable things develop at their own pace. The remarkable thing developed very fast.

By the age of eight, he had achieved a score that would put him in the top one percent of college-bound American high school seniors on the mathematics section of the SAT. He was not a high school senior. He was a child who found the questions interesting, the way other eight-year-olds find puzzles interesting. That same year he began studying high school mathematics formally. At nine, he took university-level mathematics courses at Flinders University. At ten, he represented Australia in the International Mathematical Olympiad, becoming, at that age, the youngest person in the history of the competition to participate. He came back the following year with a bronze medal, the year after that with a silver, and the year after that — at thirteen — with a gold. No one in the history of the IMO had won gold at a younger age.

He completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Flinders University by the age of seventeen and entered Princeton University's graduate mathematics program. His doctoral dissertation, completed under the supervision of Elias Stein — one of the most distinguished harmonic analysts of the twentieth century — was finished by the time Tao was twenty. Princeton gave him his PhD. Princeton also, effectively, gave him back immediately: UCLA hired him as a full professor at twenty-four, making him one of the youngest full professors in the university's history. He has been there ever since.

What distinguishes Tao from other extraordinary mathematicians is not merely his early achievement — early achievement, in mathematics, is not uncommon — but the range and depth of his sustained adult work. Where most mathematicians of the first rank spend their careers mastering one or two areas to the point of genuine original contribution, Tao has produced landmark results in partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis, additive number theory, random matrix theory, and compressed sensing. His 2004 work with Ben Green proving that the prime numbers contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions — the Green-Tao theorem — solved a conjecture that had defeated mathematicians for over a century. In compressed sensing, his work transformed signal processing in ways that are now embedded in MRI machines worldwide. He has solved problems in fields he had not previously worked in, on timescales that colleagues describe as simply incomprehensible.

In 2006, the International Mathematical Union awarded him the Fields Medal — the highest honor in mathematics, sometimes described as the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize — for "his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory." He was thirty-one. He was also awarded the MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called "genius grant") the same year, as well as the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, designed to recognize mathematicians under thirty-two who have made outstanding contributions in areas influenced by the legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.

He blogs. This is perhaps the most unusual thing about him — not the prizes, not the breadth of contribution, but the fact that he has maintained, since 2007, one of the most widely read mathematics blogs in the world, where he discusses research, explains difficult ideas at multiple levels of technicality, and participates openly in mathematical conversations with readers from every corner of the discipline. The blog is called "What's New," and it has posts on the Green-Tao theorem and posts on how to think about mathematical rigor at different stages of a mathematical education, and posts on the potential of artificial intelligence to assist human mathematical research. In 2025, he sat for an extended interview with Lex Fridman in which he discussed the hardest open problems in mathematics, the nature of mathematical creativity, and what it means to work at the edge of what the human mind can currently conceive. He is fifty years old and, by every measure available, still at the top of his field.