Terence Tao

Terence Tao is a mathematician who was born in Australia in 1975. He showed incredible talent as a child and is now a professor at UCLA. Many people call him the greatest living mathematician because of his amazing work.

A Young Talent

Tao was teaching other children math when he was just 2 years old. He took college math classes at age 9. He won a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad at age 13, the youngest person ever to do so at that time.

He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University when he was 21 and became a full professor at age 24. His speed amazed the math world.

His Work Today

Tao works on many different areas of math. He studies prime numbers, waves, and data compression. He has solved problems that stumped other mathematicians for decades.

In 2006, he won the Fields Medal, the top prize in math. He is known for explaining hard ideas clearly and for working well with other mathematicians. He writes a popular math blog that people around the world read.

Fun Facts

• Tao has written or co-written over 350 research papers.
• He scored 760 out of 800 on the math SAT when he was just 8 years old.
• Tao has worked on problems in over 20 different areas of math.

Did You Know?

Terence Tao and another mathematician proved that there are groups of prime numbers that are close together, no matter how far out in the number line you go. This was a problem people had wondered about for over 100 years!