Quotes from Terence Tao

A lot of the math that I do, it's not sort of premeditated. I talk online or with a colleague, and I get interested, and I just follow where it leads.

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

You want to get to the top of the cliff. But that's not what you focus on immediately. You focus on the next ledge just beyond your reach, because you need to do one clever thing to get up there. And then, once you get there, you do it again. A lot of this is rather boring and not very glamorous. But you can't jump cliffs in a single bound.

Talent is important, but how one develops and nurtures it is even more so.

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.

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.

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.

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 think one nice thing about mathematics is that we don't really have one prize that dominates all the others, like the Nobel prizes.

When you're concentrating hard, hours can fly by, and it's just you and a math problem.

Mathematicians are fairly cheap.

The accuracy of Wikipedia can be dodgy in some places, but in maths, it's really quite good.

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

What interests me is the connection between maths and the real world.

It is very humbling to receive the Fields Medal. The words of a Fields Medallist carry a lot of weight within mathematics - for instance, in framing future directions of research - which means that I have to watch what I say more carefully now!

I don't have any magical ability. I look at a problem, play with it, work out a strategy.

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.

There might be a hidden structure in pi that we simply haven't discovered.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Math research is more like a marathon.

It was traditional to not actually cash the prizes that Erdos did award while he was alive. People usually framed the cheque instead.