Terence Tao
Terence Chi-Shen Tao is an Australian and American mathematician. He is a Fields medalist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, 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, analytic number theory and the applications of artificial intelligence in mathematics.
Tao was born to Chinese immigrant parents and raised in Adelaide, South Australia. 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, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians.
Early life and career
Family
Tao was born to ethnic Chinese first generation immigrants from Hong Kong to Australia. Tao's father, Billy Tao, was a Chinese paediatrician who was born in Shanghai and received a medical degree from the University of Hong Kong in 1969. Tao's mother, Grace Leong, was born in Hong Kong; she received a first-class honours bachelor's degree with major in mathematics and physics from the University of Hong Kong. She was a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics in Hong Kong. Billy and Grace met as students at the University of Hong Kong. They then emigrated from Hong Kong to Australia in 1972.Tao also has two brothers, Trevor and Nigel, who are currently living in Australia. Both formerly represented Australia at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Furthermore, Trevor Tao has been representing Australia internationally in chess and holds the title of Chess International Master.
Childhood
A child prodigy, Terence Tao skipped 5 grades. 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. 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.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.
Career
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. 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. 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.He is known for his collaborative mindset; by 2006, Tao had worked with over 30 others in his discoveries, 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:
Many other results of Tao have received mainstream attention in the scientific press, including:
- his establishment of finite time blowup for a modification of the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness Millennium Problem
- his 2015 resolution of the Erdős discrepancy problem, which used entropy estimates within analytic number theory
- his 2019 progress on the Collatz conjecture, in which he proved the probabilistic claim that almost all Collatz orbits attain almost bounded values.
Recognition
Tao has won numerous awards and mathematician honours over the years. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Mathematical Society. In 2006 he received the Fields Medal; he was the first Australian, the first UCLA faculty member, and one of the youngest mathematicians to receive the award. He was also awarded the MacArthur Fellowship. He has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, Popular Science, and many other media outlets. In 2014, Tao received a CTY Distinguished Alumni Honor from Johns Hopkins Center for Gifted and Talented Youth in front of 979 attendees in 8th and 9th grade that are in the same program from which Tao graduated. In 2021, President Joe Biden announced Tao had been selected as one of 30 members of his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a body bringing together America's most distinguished leaders in science and technology. In 2021, Tao was awarded the Riemann Prize Week as recipient of the inaugural Riemann Prize 2019 by the Riemann International School of Mathematics at the University of Insubria. Tao was a finalist to become Australian of the Year in 2007.As of 2022, Tao had published over three hundred articles, along with sixteen books. He has an Erdős number of 2. He is a highly cited researcher.
An article by New Scientist writes of his ability:
British mathematician and Fields medalist Timothy Gowers remarked on Tao's breadth of knowledge:
Research contributions
Dispersive partial differential equations
From 2001 to 2010, Tao was part of a 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.Michael Christ, Colliander, and Tao developed methods of Carlos Kenig, Gustavo Ponce, and Luis Vega to establish ill-posedness of certain Schrödinger and KdV equations for Sobolev data of sufficiently low exponents. In many cases these results were sharp enough to perfectly complement well-posedness results for sufficiently large exponents as due to Bourgain, Colliander−Keel−Staffilani−Takaoka−Tao, and others. Further such notable results for Schrödinger equations were found by Tao in collaboration with Ioan Bejenaru.A particularly notable result of the Colliander−Keel−Staffilani−Takaoka−Tao collaboration established the long-time existence and scattering theory of a power-law Schrödinger equation in three dimensions. Their methods, which made use of the scale-invariance of the simple power law, were extended by Tao in collaboration with Monica Vișan and Xiaoyi Zhang to deal with nonlinearities in which the scale-invariance is broken. Rowan Killip, Tao, and Vișan later made notable progress on the two-dimensional problem in radial symmetry.
An article by Tao in 2001 considered the wave maps equation with two-dimensional domain and spherical range. He built upon earlier innovations of Daniel Tataru, who considered wave maps valued in Minkowski space. Tao proved the global well-posedness of solutions with sufficiently small initial data. The fundamental difficulty is that Tao considers smallness relative to the critical Sobolev norm, which typically requires sophisticated techniques. Tao later adapted some of his work on wave maps to the setting of the Benjamin–Ono equation; Alexandru Ionescu and Kenig later obtained improved results with Tao's methods.
In 2016, Tao constructed a variant of the Navier–Stokes equations which possess solutions exhibiting irregular behavior in finite time. Due to structural similarities between Tao's system and the Navier–Stokes equations themselves, it follows that any positive resolution of the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem must take into account the specific nonlinear structure of the equations. In particular, certain previously proposed resolutions of the problem could not be legitimate. Tao speculated that the Navier–Stokes equations might be able to simulate a Turing complete system, and that as a consequence it might be possible to resolve the existence and smoothness problem using a modification of his results. However, such results remain conjectural.
Harmonic analysis
introduced the Fuglede conjecture in the 1970s, positing a tile-based characterisation of those Euclidean domains for which a Fourier ensemble provides a basis of Tao resolved the conjecture in the negative for dimensions larger than 5, based upon the construction of an elementary counterexample to an analogous problem in the setting of finite groups.With Camil Muscalu and Christoph Thiele, Tao considered certain multilinear singular integral operators with the multiplier allowed to degenerate on a hyperplane, identifying conditions which ensure operator continuity relative to spaces. This unified and extended earlier notable results of Ronald Coifman, Carlos Kenig, Michael Lacey, Yves Meyer, Elias Stein, and Thiele, among others. Similar problems were analysed by Tao in 2001 in the context of Bourgain spaces, rather than the usual spaces. Such estimates are used in establishing well-posedness results for dispersive partial differential equations, following famous earlier work of Jean Bourgain, Kenig, Gustavo Ponce, and Luis Vega, among others.
A number of Tao's results deal with "restriction" phenomena in Fourier analysis, which have been widely studied since the time of the articles of Charles Fefferman, Robert Strichartz, and Peter Tomas in the 1970s. Here one studies the operation which restricts input functions on Euclidean space to a submanifold and outputs the product of the Fourier transforms of the corresponding measures. It is of major interest to identify exponents such that this operation is continuous relative to spaces. Such multilinear problems originated in the 1990s, including in notable work of Jean Bourgain, Sergiu Klainerman, and Matei Machedon. In collaboration with Ana Vargas and Luis Vega, Tao made some foundational contributions to the study of the bilinear restriction problem, establishing new exponents and drawing connections to the linear restriction problem. They also found analogous results for the bilinear Kakeya problem which is based upon the X-ray transform instead of the Fourier transform. In 2003, Tao adapted ideas developed by Thomas Wolff for bilinear restriction to conical sets into the setting of restriction to quadratic hypersurfaces. The multilinear setting for these problems was further developed by Tao in collaboration with Jonathan Bennett and Anthony Carbery; their work was extensively used by Bourgain and Larry Guth in deriving estimates for general oscillatory integral operators.