Terence Tao
Terence Chi-Shen Tao FAA FRS (Chinese: 陶哲軒; born 17 July 1975) is an Australian mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing and analytic number theory.[4]
Terence Tao
17 July 1975
- Australia
- United States[3]
Laura Tao
2
Fields Medal (2006)
- 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)[1]
- Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (2010)
- Pólya Prize (2010)[2]
- 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)
Three Regularity Results in Harmonic Analysis[3] (1996)
陶哲軒
陶哲轩
Táo Zhéxuān
Táo Zhéxuān
Dau Tseh-shie
Tòuh Jit-hīn
Tou4 Zit3-hin1
Tao was born to Chinese immigrant parents and raised in Adelaide. Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006 and won the Royal Medal and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014, and is a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. Tao has been the author or co-author of over three hundred research papers, for which he is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians.[5][6][7][8][9][10]
Life and career[edit]
Family[edit]
Tao's parents are first-generation immigrants from Hong Kong to Australia.[11] Tao's father, Billy Tao,[a] was a Chinese paediatrician who was born in Shanghai and earned his medical degree (MBBS) from the University of Hong Kong in 1969.[12] Tao's mother, Grace Leong,[b] was born in Hong Kong; she received a first-class honours degree in mathematics and physics at the University of Hong Kong.[10] She was a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics in Hong Kong.[13] Billy and Grace met as students at the University of Hong Kong.[14] They then emigrated from Hong Kong to Australia in 1972.[11][10]
Tao also has two brothers, Trevor and Nigel, who are currently living in Australia. Both formerly represented the states at the International Mathematical Olympiad.[15] Furthermore, Trevor Tao has been representing Australia internationally in chess and holds the title of Chess International Master.[16] Tao speaks Cantonese but cannot write Chinese. Tao is married to Laura Tao, an electrical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.[10][17] They live in Los Angeles, California, and have two children.[18]
Childhood[edit]
A child prodigy,[19] Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only three children in the history of the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just eight years old; Tao scored a 760.[20] Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, stated that Tao had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching.[6][21]
Tao was the youngest participant to date in the International Mathematical Olympiad, first competing at the age of ten; in 1986, 1987, and 1988, he won a bronze, silver, and gold medal, respectively. Tao remains the youngest winner of each of the three medals in the Olympiad's history, having won the gold medal at the age of 13 in 1988.[22]
Career[edit]
At age 14, Tao attended the Research Science Institute, a summer program for secondary students. In 1991, he received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the age of 16 from Flinders University under the direction of Garth Gaudry.[23] In 1992, he won a postgraduate Fulbright Scholarship to undertake research in mathematics at Princeton University in the United States. From 1992 to 1996, Tao was a graduate student at Princeton University under the direction of Elias Stein, receiving his PhD at the age of 21.[23] In 1996, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1999, when he was 24, he was promoted to full professor at UCLA and remains the youngest person ever appointed to that rank by the institution.[23]
He is known for his collaborative mindset; by 2006, Tao had worked with over 30 others in his discoveries,[6] reaching 68 co-authors by October 2015.
Tao has had a particularly extensive collaboration with British mathematician Ben J. Green; together they proved the Green–Tao theorem, which is well known among both amateur and professional mathematicians. This theorem states that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers. The New York Times described it this way:[24][25]
Research contributions[edit]
Dispersive partial differential equations[edit]
From 2001 to 2010, Tao was part of a well-known collaboration with James Colliander, Markus Keel, Gigliola Staffilani, and Hideo Takaoka. They found a number of novel results, many to do with the well-posedness of weak solutions, for Schrödinger equations, KdV equations, and KdV-type equations.[C+03]