![]() ![]() The ancient art of mathematics, Tao has discovered, does not reward speed so much as patience, cunning and, perhaps most surprising of all, the sort of gift for collaboration and improvisation that characterises the best jazz musicians. Even those who experience great success through their college years may turn out not to have what it takes. "I sort of imagined a committee would hand me problems to solve or something."īut it turned out that the work of real mathematicians bears little resemblance to the manipulations and memorisation of the maths student. "When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed," he said in a lilting Australian accent. That spring day in his office, reflecting on his career so far, Tao told me that his view of mathematics has utterly changed since childhood. Today, many regard Tao as the finest mathematician of his generation. He has since won many other prizes, including a MacArthur "genius" grant and the Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize for mathematicians. Three years later, at age 10, Tao became the youngest person in history to win a medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad. The work of a mathematician takes him into other mathematical minds over the millennia, back to Pythagoras.Ī few months later, halfway through the school year, Tao was moved up to 12th-grade maths. His teacher told the reporter that he hardly taught Tao anything, because Tao was always working two lessons ahead of the others. The clipping includes a photo of a diminutive Tao in 11th-grade maths class, wearing a V-neck sweater over a white turtleneck, kneeling on his chair so he can reach a desk he is sharing with a girl more than twice his age. ![]() An old headline in his hometown paper, The Advertiser, reads: "TINY TERENCE, 7, IS HIGH-SCHOOL WHIZ." Early brush with fameįame came early for Tao, who was born in South Australia. The couch had been pulled away from the wall to accommodate the beat-up Trek bike he rides to work.Īt the room's other end stood a fibreboard bookcase haphazardly piled with books, including Compactness and Contradiction and Poincaré's Legacies, Part I, two of the 16 volumes Tao has written since he was a teenager. Behind him, a small almond couch faced a glyph-covered blackboard running the length of the room. Thin and unassuming, he was dressed in Birkenstocks, a rumpled blue-gray polo shirt and jeans with the cuffs turned up. Tao, who is 40, sat at a desk by the window, papers lying in drifts at the margins. And in the process, he will have also solved the Navier-Stokes global regularity problem, which has become, since it emerged more than a century ago, one of the most important in all of mathematics. But, Tao explained, if he can show mathematically that there is nothing, in principle, preventing such a fiendish contraption from operating, then it would mean that water can, in fact, explode. It was merely a thought experiment, of the sort that Einstein used to develop the theory of special relativity. Tao was not proposing constructing such a machine - "I don't know how!" he said, laughing. Now imagine, he went on, that this machine were able to make a smaller, faster copy of itself, which could then make another, and so on, until one "has infinite speed in a tiny space and blows up". As he talked, Tao carved shapes in the air with his hands, like a magician. It would be built not of rods and gears but from a pattern of interacting currents. Imagine, he said, that someone awfully clever could construct a machine out of pure water. Professor Terry Tao, an Australian working at the University of California in Los Angeles, who has won a Fields medal for mathematics, the equivalent of the Nobel prize. ![]() It's a decades-old conundrum, and Tao has recently been working on an approach to a solution - one part fanciful, one part outright absurd, like some lost passage from Alice in Wonderland. And yet, Tao explained, nobody can say precisely why. Someone tossing a penny into the fountain by the faculty centre or skipping a stone at the Santa Monica beach could apparently set off a chain reaction that would take out Southern California. A widely used set of equations describes the behaviour of fluids like water, but there seems to be nothing in those equations, he told me, that prevents a wayward eddy from suddenly turning in on itself, tightening into an angry gyre, until the density of the energy at its core becomes infinite: a catastrophic "singularity". ![]() This April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence Tao mused about the possibility that water could spontaneously explode. ![]()
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