Author Profile
Terence Tao
1975 • Australian • Mathematician
40
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 40 quotesMath 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.— Terence Tao
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.— Terence Tao
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.— Terence Tao
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.— Terence Tao
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.— Terence Tao
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.— Terence Tao
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.— Terence Tao
I was never very good at school with... humanities... anything which was more a matter of opinion.— Terence Tao
Can you make fancy patterns of water that actually have some computation power? I'm betting that fluids are complex enough to do this.— Terence Tao
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.— Terence Tao
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.— Terence Tao