Terence Tao

Terrence Tao’s parents met at the University of Hong Kong as students. Later, they emigrated from Hong Kong to Australia where Tao was born.

His wife Laura works at NASA in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an engineer. They have a son and a daughter and live in Los Angeles, California.

Tao’s contribution to mathematics has been enormous with over 300 research papers and 17 books so far.

Terence Tao was born on 17 July 1975 in Adelaide, Australia. His father, Dr. Billy Tao, is a paediatrician, and his mother, Grace was school teacher of mathematics and physics in Hong Kong.

Dr. Billy Tao was born in Shanghai and had earned his MBBS degree from University of Hong Kong in 1969. Whereas, Tao’s mother Grace had received a first-class honours degree in physics and mathematics from University of Hong Kong.

Tao has two brothers, Trevor and Nigel, who live in Australia. Both Trevor and Nigel have represented Australia at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Also, Tao’s brothers too have contributed exceptionally to the field of mathematics.

Tao was two years old when his parents started to notice that he was different from other children. He would teach five year olds spellings and addition. When his parents questioned him about his skills, he would answer that he learned it by watching Sesame Street on television.

Tao’s parents decided to put him in school when he was three and a half years of age. But soon enough they realised that he wasn’t ready for schooling. Also, his teachers found it difficult to teach a genius like him.

After completing his PhD at the age of 21, Terence Tao joined the University of California as a faculty. At the age of 24, he became a full-time professor at UCLA and the youngest ever to be appointed on that rank at UCLA.

Along with Ben J. Green of Oxford University, Tao proved the Green-Tao theorem which is one of his acclaimed works. By 2006, Tao had worked with over 30 others and collaborated with 68 co-authors.

For his Green-Tao theorem, Tao received many medals and awards. He became the youngest mathematician, and the first UCLA faculty member to be awarded Fields Medal in 2006.

For his phenomenal work, he was nominated for Australian of the Year in 2007. Tao published another work ‘Tao’s inequality’ in the same year.

In 2007, Tao and a Vietnamese Mathematician from Yale University, Van H. Vu unravelled the circular law conjecture.

Terrence Tao’s contribution to the field of mathematics has been huge. But, his most notable work has been the Green-Tao theorem which he proved with his long-time collaborator, Ben Green. Due to this work, Tao became a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Science. In 2007, he was also elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Also, Tao was awarded the Australian Mathematical Society Medal of 2004 for the Green-Tao theorem.