Terence Tao

Born in Australia, Professor Tao attended college-level mathematics courses from age 9, received bachelor and master degrees from Flinders University by age 16, and a PhD from Princeton at age 21. He went on to become UCLA’s youngest ever full professor at age 24, before winning the MacArthur ‘genius’ grant and the Fields Medal (often considered the ‘Nobel Prize in Math’) by age 31. Today, Tao's areas of research include harmonic analysis, PDE, combinatorics, and number theory. He is considered by many to be the world’s greatest mathematician of his generation.