Terence Tao

If I experiment enough, I get a deeper understanding.

Math education has changed over the years. In the 19th century, they taught spherical trigonometry because one of the biggest applications of mathematics was navigating the ocean. This is no longer so relevant.

If there is something that I should know how to do but don't, it bugs me. I feel like I have to sit down and work out exactly what the problem is.

I tend to change research direction every few years or so.

I have been lucky to find very good collaborators who have taught me a lot, have introduced me to several new fields of mathematics, or have shown me new insights.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was never very good at school with... humanities... anything which was more a matter of opinion.

I don't like accepting things at face value.

I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.

Can you make fancy patterns of water that actually have some computation power? I'm betting that fluids are complex enough to do this.

One can think of any given axiom system as being like a computer with a certain limited amount of memory or processing power. One could switch to a computer with even more storage, but no matter how large an amount of storage space the computer has, there will still exist some tasks that are beyond its ability.

Math research is more like a marathon.

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.

I am still very fond of Australia, but my life is now in Los Angeles.

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.

Most of what I do does not save lives.

The standard high school curriculum traditionally has been focused towards physics and engineering. So calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra have always been the most emphasized, and for good reason - these are very important.