Here he is
Posted on 08/23/2006 1:41:53 AM PDT by Dundee
A boy genius from Adelaide has won the world's most famous maths prize. He gives Brendan O'Keefe a glimpse inside his extraordinary mind
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 Sesame Street'."
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 Australia's first winner.
The International Mathematical Union, which bestows the award, cites Tao as "a supreme problem-solver whose spectacular work has had an impact across several mathematical areas".
"He combines sheer technical power, an 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 Flinders University, Adelaide, Gaudry taught Tao on Wednesday afternoons. He remembers "a tiny little boy, a delightful kid" with staggering "insight and brilliance", who was "completely off the scale".
"By age 14 he was doing very advanced mathematics, the sort of thing in US first-year graduate study, and I gave him the hardest stuff," Gaudry says. "He was just so creative. I'd give him some really esoteric problems and he would just invent things and he was 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 Madrid last night to witness Tao's investiture into the maths hall of fame.
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 Bellevue Heights Primary School in the Adelaide hills at age four.
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 Blackwood High School at Eden Hills in Adelaide at age seven but he remained in some classes at Bellevue Heights.
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 University of Adelaide. He works for the Defence Science Technology Organisation. Youngest brother Nigel, 27, has degrees in computer science and economics and works for the internet search company Google in Sydney.
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 Princeton University in the US followed at 21 and, at 24, Tao was made professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Apart from stints at the University of NSW in 1999 and 2000 and the Australian National University in Canberra from 2001 to 2003, Tao has lived full-time in the US since starting his PhD. It was Gaudry who encouraged Tao to leave Australia.
"It worked out well for me as I was exposed to different types of mathematics that I didn't encounter in Australia," says Tao. "I think I am going to stay over here (in the US) more or less permanently, though I do plan to visit Australia about once a year."
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 Cambridge University, is to show that it is possible to compile any sequence of evenly spaced prime numbers. This is called number theory and it has challenged, confounded and entertained mathematicians for centuries.
Euclid in 300BC was the first to prove that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Number theory is at the heart of the encryption codes that organisations such as banks use to protect electronic information from hackers.
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 University of New England in northern NSW was cut from seven positions to four.
"There's an expectation that four faculty members can deliver an entire academic program ... at a place that calls itself a university; it's pathetic," Trudinger says.
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 Australia and think you could receive an education of that quality," he says. "These days, I'm not so sure."
ACCELERATED EDUCATION
July 17, 1975: Terry Tao is born in Adelaide to Billy, a pediatrician, and Grace, a maths and physics teacher. They have two other sons, Trevor and then Nigel.
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 Bellevue Heights in the Adelaide Hills and is soon accelerated to advanced years for mathematics.
Age seven: Studies a mixture of primary school classes and secondary classes at Blackwood High School.
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 Flinders University.
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 US graduate student.
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 Princeton University.
Age 24: Made a professor of mathematics at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Age 31: Wins Fields medal.
I still feel like an idiot, though... :-)
With an IQ of 221 he'd make your average Mensa member feel like Forest Gump.
Here he is
. . . and to think, I'm having fits trying to complete my current senior-level Statistics/Probability course! I, of course, miss the 221 IQ level by . . . um . . . lots.
I would be curious to know how they taught him phys ed and social skills. It's not mentioned, but surely they did something?
They simply worked a typical homeschool solution through the school system because they had enough clout and the system was fascinated with his capabilities.
Well, I balanced my checkbook this morning. :-)
Yeah, I know. :-)
Intertel, too.
(Looking around...Misplaced my bubble pipe again....Must be with the Yo-yo.)
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