Australian - Mathematician | July 17, 1975 -
I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.
Terence Tao
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I always liked numbers.
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I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.
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It was traditional to not actually cash the prizes that Erdos did award while he was alive. People usually framed the cheque instead.
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When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quieten me down.
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I often don't know what I'll be working on next year or a year from now. There is often a chance meeting, or something that I worked on 10 years ago suddenly becomes important again.
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I think one nice thing about mathematics is that we don't really have one prize that dominates all the others, like the Nobel prizes.
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The accuracy of Wikipedia can be dodgy in some places, but in maths, it's really quite good.
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I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.
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In 1992, when I was 16, I moved to the United States to start working on my Ph.D. at Princeton University in New Jersey.
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My life is more than just my work. I am a husband and a father and a proud citizen of two countries: my homeland of Australia and my adopted country here in the United States.
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Talent is important, but how one develops and nurtures it is even more so.
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