Words matter. These are the best Terence Tao Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Talent is important, but how one develops and nurtures it is even more so.
When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed.
Mathematicians are fairly cheap.
Math education has changed over the years. In the 19th century, they taught spherical trigonometry because one of the biggest applications of mathematics was navigating the ocean. This is no longer so relevant.
I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.
One can think of any given axiom system as being like a computer with a certain limited amount of memory or processing power. One could switch to a computer with even more storage, but no matter how large an amount of storage space the computer has, there will still exist some tasks that are beyond its ability.
If I don’t understand something properly, every single component, it really bugs me.
I don’t have any magical ability. I look at a problem, play with it, work out a strategy.
I think one nice thing about mathematics is that we don’t really have one prize that dominates all the others, like the Nobel prizes.
I enjoy a good meal, a good vacation, or a good movie, much as anyone else would.
I tend to change research direction every few years or so.
The standard high school curriculum traditionally has been focused towards physics and engineering. So calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra have always been the most emphasized, and for good reason – these are very important.
I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.
I don’t like accepting things at face value.
When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quieten me down.
Most of what I do does not save lives.
Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.
I recall being fascinated by numbers even at age three and viewed their manipulation as a kind of game.
I was never very good at school with… humanities… anything which was more a matter of opinion.
Math research is more like a marathon.
A lot of the math that I do, it’s not sort of premeditated. I talk online or with a colleague, and I get interested, and I just follow where it leads.
My life is more than just my work. I am a husband and a father and a proud citizen of two countries: my homeland of Australia and my adopted country here in the United States.
There might be a hidden structure in pi that we simply haven’t discovered.
I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.
The accuracy of Wikipedia can be dodgy in some places, but in maths, it’s really quite good.