AUSSIE GENIUS Terry Tao 31 Won Coveted PRIZE in MATHEMATICS–Fields Medal in 2006; 221 IQ: B Sc at 16; M Sc at 17; PhD at 21, Professor UCLA at 24
We look with awe this genius who seems to accomplish so much at so young an age. But all of you possess genius minds as well, but you look to these individuals as your geniuses, who happen to connect slightly more, momentarily, with some mathematical information.
They offer this information to you as great revelations of fact. They are, through their most powerful and magnificently gigantic scopes, viewing just only a pinpoint of reality!
You do not incorporate a basic understanding of what and who you are. Therefore, how do you determine to understand what you have created within a universe? You do incorporate what you choose to call genius minds.
You are all multidimensional creatures, and you study one dimension! Therefore, you base facts upon one dimension, and you express these as temporary truths. There are myriads of dimensions we can explore!
The multidimensional nature of the human psyche gives clues as to the abilities that lie within each individual. These are part of your racial heritage. They give notice of psychic bridges connecting the known and 'unknown' realities in which you dwell. There are springboards to lead you into other levels of understanding and initiate you in journeys in which it may seem that the familiar is left far behind.
The known reality is even more precious, more "real," because you will find it illuminated both within and without by the rich fabric of an 'unknown' reality now seen emerging from the most intimate portions of daily life.
Your concepts of personhood are now limiting you personally and en masse, and yet your religions, metaphysics, histories, and even your sciences are hinged upon your ideas of who and what you are. Your psychologies do not explain your own reality to you. They cannot contain your experience. Your religions do not explain your greater reality, and your sciences leave you just as ignorant about the nature of the universe in which you dwell.
These institutions and disciplines are composed of individuals, each restrained by limiting ideas about their own private reality; and so it is with private reality that we will begin and always return, period.
If we can expand our private reality and determine to understand the nature of the unknown elements of the self, and its greater world then we can choose from a myriad of probable realities.
The fact is that in life you poise delicately and yet perfectly between realities, and after death you do the same
Terry (right) is shown with David Hunt, leader of the Australian IMO team in
He's got the numbers From The Australian;
A boy genius from
TERRY Tao was just two when he stunned a family gathering at home in Adelaide by giving a maths and spelling lesson to friends' children who were up to five years his senior. Using blocks, and knowledge he had gleaned from television, Tao showed the children how to add up and to make words.
Tao's father, Billy, an Adelaide pediatrician, remembers his son's party-stopper.
"The children were playing and the adults were talking ... suddenly, we found the children had gone very quiet," Billy Tao says.
"We found that Terry was teaching them numbers and the alphabet. The other kids were a lot older. He was showing them how to add and so on. I said 'how do you know all these numbers and alphabet?' and he said 'From watching
It was an early indication that the boy would become a world-beating genius with a 221 IQ: he had two university degrees by the age of 17, was made a professor of mathematics at 24 and, last night, the 31-year-old Tao was presented with the world's highest prize in mathematics, the Fields Medal, regarded as the discipline's Nobel prize.
He is
"He combines sheer technical power, and other-worldly ingenuity for hitting upon new ideas and a startlingly natural point of view that leaves other mathematicians wondering, 'Why didn't anyone see that before?'."
Tao himself is modest about the honour: "I don't really know how it will affect my career. I haven't had an award like this before. I'm trying to focus on continuing my research and other work, such as advising graduate students."
An early mentor and academic supervisor, the director of the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics, Garth Gaudry, says Tao is a phenomenon.
While most leading research mathematicians work on two or three projects at a time with collaborators, Tao juggles 10 to 15, Gaudry says.
When Gaudry took on the 12-year-old Tao at Billy Tao's behest, the youngster had already exhausted several private tutors. Then a maths professor at
the scale".
"By age 14 he was doing very advanced mathematics, the sort of thing in
absolutely spot on. The creativity was like flashes of lightning in front of my eyes. I've never had a student like this."
Gaudry says they both loved the sessions. "He was just such a happy person who enjoyed every moment of what he was doing. It was a great relationship from the beginning and that has continued to this day," he says.
Gaudry was in
With backgrounds in pediatrics and maths teaching, Tao's parents, Hong Kong Chinese who came to Australia in 1972, were well-placed to plan their first born's schooling.
After a premature start at primary school, Tao went back to
His parents and principal Keith Lomax designed a staggered schooling for him.
At age six, Tao was studying some classes in grades two and three, and maths at grade six and seven level. His father says: "Some education people think that accelerated education is the way to go with all gifted children. But my concept is you have to design courses according to people. Don't accelerate beyond what is good for the child."
Tao started classes at
By eight he had finished primary school and, while he was studying such subjects as geography, biology and chemistry at Year 7 and 8 level, Tao was already devouring Year 11 and 12 maths and physics.
"His subjects were never strictly according to the timetable of the curriculum. It was always very loose," Billy Tao says. "This allows him to develop academically according to his intellectual ability but kept him normal socially."
Tao was always in good company. Parents Billy and Grace produced three nodes of extreme intelligence. Brother Trevor, 29, is an autistic music savant and chess champion with degrees in music who last year earned a PhD in applied mathematics from the
works for the internet search company Google in
Tao's next step into higher education was also a mixed one. He was enrolled at Flinders at the age of nine while still studying at Blackwood High. By 16 he had completed a bachelor of science degree and the following year he wrapped up a masters of science degree with honours. A PhD in maths at
21 and, at 24, Tao was made professor of mathematics at the
Apart from stints at the
"It worked out well for me as I was exposed to different types of mathematics that I didn't encounter in
He lives in LA where he is married to Laura, an American of Korean background, and they have a son, three-year-old William, whom Billy says is "very smart, reading by himself".
Tao's work, like that of many mathematicians, is esoteric, understood and appreciated by very few, although its applications power the hi-tech modern world.
He works in a theoretical field called harmonic analysis - an advanced form of calculus that uses equations from physics - as well as non-linear partial differential equations, algebraic geometry, number theory and combinatorics. He has also made mathematical descriptions of wave motions of light in fibre-optic cables. His latest breakthrough, in a collaboration with Ben Green of
But Tao and Green's work is so new and so advanced that even they don't know what its uses might be.
"Ben and I are investigating these tools further and it looks like they are going to have many applications though of course it's hard to say at this point," Tao explains.
The under-appreciation of maths is not lost on Gaudry. "People don't appreciate that there is an enormous amount of maths research going on," he says. "The problem for maths is that some of the most famous and wonderful advances in our subject are hidden inside the technology that we enjoy."
Compact discs, mobile phones, MP3 players and special effects in movies are all products driven by maths research. But under-appreciation of maths is not limited to the uninitiated. Maths is struggling in our universities.
A recent survey by the Australian Mathematical Science Institute of job ads in The Australian's Higher Education Supplement found that in an 18-month period, 70 mathematicians had quit academic posts but only 18 ads had called for replacements.
"It's a disaster (but) the effects are not immediate," says ANU professor of mathematics Neil Trudinger. "In time they'll be translated into disadvantages in the whole scientific, technological effort in keeping up with the rest of the world."
Earlier this year, the maths department at the
AMSI director Philip Broadbridge says Tao was fortunate to have studied when he did. "The time when Tao was taught and mentored you could go to virtually any university in
+++++++++++++
TERRY TAO’S ACCELERATED EDUCATION
Age two: Tao shows the children of family friends how to count using blocks.
Age three: Starts primary school but is withdrawn soon after.
Age four: Restarts primary school at
Age seven: Studies a mixture of primary school classes and secondary classes at
Age eight: Finishes primary school. Studies Year 11 physics and Year 11 and 12 maths. Teaches himself first-year university maths course.
Age nine: Starts at
Age 10: Bronze medallist at International Mathematics Olympiad for students not yet enrolled in a university.
Age 11: Olympiad silver medallist.
Age 12: Begins studying with tutor Garth Gaudry and continues to the level of a first-year
Age 13: Olympiad gold medallist.
Age 16: Graduates from Flinders with a bachelor of science.
Age 17: Masters degree in science.
Age 20: PhD in maths from
Age 24: Made a professor of mathematics at the
Age 31: Wins Fields medal. – AUGUST 2006
Brendan O'Keefe is a higher education writer at The Australian.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au
Terry Tao, former
Number Theory is a glamour area of pure mathematics and the world's top mathematicians have worked for centuries on problems form this field. The distribution of prime numbers has attracted particular attention. The most important outstanding problem in all of mathematics is to be found here as Riemann's Hypothesis, which was first postulated over 150 years ago. Much of the work in getting where we are in resolving Riemann's Hypothesis has involved methods from analysis.
A particular property which is well known is the existence of pairs (with distance of two between them). Examples of this are 3 and 5, 5 and 7, 11 and 13, 17 and 19. Except for 3, 5 and 7 triples are not possible as one member would in turn have to be divisible by 3.
However the existence of larger arithmetic sequences with different "differences" has also attracted considerable interest. The eminent
Certainly many longer progressions, with larger differences can be found, such as 5, 17, 29, 41 and 53.
Hardy certainly believed, without being able to prove, that there were was no upper limit on the length of such a sequence.
Terry Tao, now at University of California at Los Angeles, still only 28 years old, and Ben Green, a former member of the UK IMO team and at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (at the time of this work), have proved that there is indeed no upper limit. Arithmetic Progressions of any length can be found.
Interestingly, Terry and Ben have applied some very original ideas, also using mathematical analysis in solving this number theory problem.
This is a ground-breaking result which has attracted considerable attention.
References include New Scientist,
Brief Track Record and CV
Terry Tao, Blackwood High School, SA, Bronze 1986, 1987,1988
BSc (First Class Hons, Pure Maths), Flinders 1992 (the youngest ever). Was later awarded a Fulbright Postgraduate Student Award to study for PhD at
Terry Tao (IMO 86,87,88) ;He won bronze, silver, gold respectively in those years.
Not very impressive...but you have to take into account of the fact that he was 12 years-old when he won the gold medal in 88. To this day, he is still the youngest ever gold medalist at the IMO.
- I am a Professor at the Department of Mathematics, UCLA. I work in a number of mathematical areas, but primarily in harmonic analysis, PDE, geometric combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, analytic number theory, and algebraic combinatorics. I am part of the Analysis Group here at UCLA. Here are some of my preprints.
- I maintain a harmonic analysis page for conferences, web pages, links, etc (though I’ve stopped actively updating the conference and harmonic analyst links) as well as the Harmonic Analysis mailing list. I am also actively contributing to the DispersiveWiki project.
- Think you might know me from somewhere?. Here's how you can contact me.
- GoTo TOP (Main Page)
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home