![]() ![]() "I didn't feel I was the most qualified for this prize," he told The New York Times. He thought the money should be dispersed between more people. Before the announcement, Tao tried to convince Milner not to give him the $US3 million prize. ![]() Last year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Russian tech tycoon Yuri Milner recognised Tao's transformational contributions when they announced he was one of five recipients of their inaugural 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. Around about then, people started to describe him as "the Mozart of math". Tao has pages of awards, fellowships, prizes and medals to his name - most notably, the Fields Medal, the maths world's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, which he received in 2006 when he was 31 "for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory". "Other mathematicians speak of him in tones of awe." His talents, says Rudnick, are "other-worldly". "He is arguably the world's best mathematician," says Joseph Rudnick, the dean of Physical Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Tao, now 39, has been a mathematics professor since he was 24. Problem solver: Mathematics maestro Terry Tao. He got his masters when he was 17 and his PhD at Princeton University at 20. By the time he was 16, he'd finished his science degree. When he was nine, Tao commenced part-time studies in mathematics at Flinders University. ![]() "Terry hears mathematics and sees and smells mathematics in a way we don't." "Off the scale," says Miraca Gross, an authority on the education of gifted children, describing his IQ. Academics studied it with astonishment throughout his Adelaide childhood as he charged through IQ tests and International Mathematical Olympiads with unprecedented results. Yet this is a man with an intimidatingly rare and precious mind. It's hard to be intimidated by a man playing with a toy pony. Terence Tao - Terry, as he's mostly known - is sitting on a leather sofa in his Los Angeles living room, thin, bare-footed and bespectacled, talking to his three-year-old daughter, Madeleine, just home from a birthday party. He presses a plastic stethoscope into the soft toy's body, feigns a pony cough. Note that this code might not work perfectly in Gmail environments.One of the world's greatest minds is playing with a toy pony. Once one does so, any text such as that is between brackets and semicolons as indicated will be converted to LaTeX in your browser (though note that it will still be rendered as plain text in browsers in which TeX the world is not installed). (Internet Explorer) This plugin is not supported by IE.(Chrome in other OSes) Follow the instructions at this link.(Safari) Install Greasekit, and then download this userscript.(Chrome in Windows or MacOS) Install Greasemetal if this is not already installed, and then download this userscript.(Firefox) Install Greasemonkey if this is not already installed, and then download this userscript.This plugin can be installed on the following browsers: However, one can mimic LaTeX support by installing some version of the “ TeX the world” plugin. The Google+ format does not directly support LaTeX. Comments that involve personal attacks, which do not advance the conversation, are self-promoting or are otherwise not relevant to the main topic will be subject to deletion. The comment policy for my blog is also applicable to the buzz feed I request that comments be constructive, polite, and at least tangentially related to the topic at hand. (On the other hand, the blog posts here should also be automatically reposted in the Google+ feed.) This feed contains a number of short posts, mostly of a mathematical nature, that are too brief or trivial to merit a post on this blog. I am complementing this blog with a Google+ feed (which evolved from a now inactive Google Buzz feed). ![]()
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