![]() Mathematical problems, or puzzles, are important to real mathematics (like solving real-life problems), just as fables, stories and anecdotes are important to the young in understanding real life. Volume grows spatially slower than scaling. What interests me is the connection between maths and the real world. There might be a hidden structure in pi that we simply haven’t discovered. 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.Įducation is a complex, multifaceted, and painstaking process, and being gifted does not make this less so. In the 19th century, they taught spherical trigonometry because one of the biggest applications of mathematics was navigating the ocean. Math education has changed over the years. 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. ![]() 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. Pointing out that countless great mathematicians had tried to solve the problem and failed before you came along is in particularly bad taste and should be avoided completely. 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. People usually framed the cheque instead. It was traditional to not actually cash the prizes that Erdos did award while he was alive. But you can’t jump cliffs in a single bound. A lot of this is rather boring and not very glamorous. And then, once you get there, you do it again. You focus on the next ledge just beyond your reach, because you need to do one clever thing to get up there. But that’s not what you focus on immediately. ~ Terence Tao.Īt a purely formal level, one could call probability theory the study of measure spaces with total measure one, but that would be like calling number theory the study of strings of digits which terminate. ![]() 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. ~ Terence Tao.Ĭan you make fancy patterns of water that actually have some computation power? I’m betting that fluids are complex enough to do this. 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 talk online or with a colleague, and I get interested, and I just follow where it leads. ~ Terence Tao.Ī lot of the math that I do, it’s not sort of premeditated. There is often a chance meeting, or something that I worked on 10 years ago suddenly becomes important again. I often don’t know what I’ll be working on next year or a year from now. I feel like I have to sit down and work out exactly what the problem is. If there is something that I should know how to do but don’t, it bugs me. I recall being fascinated by numbers even at age three and viewed their manipulation as a kind of game. They’re going to be engineers, statisticians – in many ways, that’s the more important mission of math education. Most students who take math classes aren’t going to be mathematicians. When you’re concentrating hard, hours can fly by, and it’s just you and a math problem. If I experiment enough, I get a deeper understanding. I look at a problem, play with it, work out a strategy. ![]() I enjoy a good meal, a good vacation, or a good movie, much as anyone else would. I tend to change research direction every few years or so. Talent is important, but how one develops and nurtures it is even more so. I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do. Terence Tao is a mathematician who was born in Australia and raised in the United States. ![]()
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