Terence Tao

Terence Tao was born on July 17, 1975, in Adelaide, Australia.⁠[1]

His father, Billy Tao, is a Chinese-born pediatrician and his mother, Grace, was born in Hong Kong; they met at the University of Hong Kong and emigrated to Australia in 1972. He is the eldest of three sons, with younger brothers Trevor and Nigel.⁠[2]

At 8 he scored 760 out of 800 on the SAT math section, and by 9 he was taking math classes at Flinders University. In 1985 his father took him to the Institute for Advanced Study in PrincetonPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry to have Enrico Bombieri and Charles Fefferman assess his potential.⁠[3]

He competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad at ages 10, 11, and 12, winning bronze, silver, and gold medals respectively, and remains the youngest gold medalist in the competition’s history.⁠[4]

Under Garth Gaudry, he received a B.Sc. (Hons) in mathematics from Flinders University in December 1991 and an M.Sc. in August 1992, and held a Fulbright postgraduate scholarship from 1992 to 1995.⁠[1]

Flinders University says he was among its youngest-ever students and earned a master’s degree at 16.⁠[5]

He studied under Elias Stein at Princeton University, received his PhD in mathematics in June 1996, and joined UCLA that year as a Hedrick Assistant Professor.⁠[1]

In 2000 he was promoted to full professor of mathematics at UCLA at 24, the youngest in the university’s history.⁠[5]

Early at UCLA he met Laura, then a student, later an electrical engineer at NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; they married in 2002 and have two children.⁠[2]

On April 8, 2004, he and Ben Green posted the paper “The primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions” on arXiv, proving that the primes contain arithmetic progressions of any length.⁠[6]

The paper was later published in Annals of Mathematics, Volume 167 (2008), Issue 2, pages 481–547.⁠[7]

On September 10, 2004, he, Emmanuel Candès, and Justin Romberg posted “Robust Uncertainty Principles: Exact Signal Reconstruction from Highly Incomplete Frequency Information” on arXiv, on exactly reconstructing signals from highly incomplete frequency information.⁠[8]

In August 2006, during the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, he received the Fields Medal at 31, becoming the first UCLA professor to win it.⁠[9]

He was named to the MacArthur Foundation’s Class of 2006 Fellows at 31; the foundation highlighted his work with Allen Knutson reducing Horn’s conjecture to a geometric combinatorial configuration known as a “honeycomb.”⁠[10]

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2012 Crafoord Prize in Mathematics, worth SEK 4 million, to him and Jean Bourgain, with the ceremony held in Lund on May 15, 2012; the announcement listed him as an Australian and American citizen.⁠[11]

On June 23, 2014, the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, launched by Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner, named its five inaugural laureates, including him, each receiving $3 million.⁠[12]

The citation honored his breakthroughs in harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations, and analytic number theory; the prize page also notes his proof that every odd integer above 1 is a sum of at most five primes.⁠[13]

The Royal Society awarded him the 2014 Royal Medal for his “many deep and varied contributions to mathematics,” with the medals presented on December 1 that year.⁠[14]

On September 17, 2015, he posted a preprint resolving the discrepancy problem that Paul Erdős had posed around 1932; the work built in part on a 2010 Polymath online collaboration launched by Timothy Gowers.⁠[15]

The Carnegie Corporation of New York named him one of its 2019 “Great Immigrants” honorees, noting that he came to the United States at 16 for his PhD.⁠[16]

On September 8, 2019, he posted a proof showing that the Collatz conjecture is “almost” true for “almost all” numbers; he said he had not expected to solve the problem completely.⁠[17]

The 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research went to him, Yves Meyer, Ingrid Daubechies, and Emmanuel Candès for their contributions to mathematical theories and techniques for data processing.⁠[18]

On September 22, 2021, President Joe Biden named 27 members of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), including him as a UCLA mathematics professor.⁠[19]

He served on PCAST until 2024 and has sat on prize committees including those for the Abel Prize and the Fields Medal.⁠[4]

In January 2022 he launched MasterClass’s first series on mathematical thinking, and that September he received the Global Australian of the Year award from Advance Global Australia.⁠[20]

On November 9, 2023, he, Timothy Gowers, and colleagues posted a paper proving a version of Marton’s conjecture (the polynomial Freiman–Ruzsa conjecture); he then led an effort to formalize the proof in Lean and announced its completion on December 5.⁠[21]

From 2024 he launched or joined several online collaborations, including the Equational Theories project mapping implications between equational theories of magmas, the Lean formalization project PNT+, and, in 2025, an Erdős problems database tracking the status of problems on erdosproblems.com.⁠[22]

On December 5, 2024, Renaissance Philanthropy and XTX Markets announced the $9.2 million AI for Math Fund with him as an adviser; he said the next generation of AI tools could enable collaboration among mathematicians that was previously impossible.⁠[23]

He appeared on episode 472 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing Navier–Stokes singularities, AI-assisted theorem proving, the Lean programming language, DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry’s AlphaProof, the twin prime conjecture, and the Collatz conjecture.⁠[24]

In July 2025 the federal government suspended about $584 million in grants to UCLA, affecting his own research grant and IPAM’s; he called the cuts “indiscriminate” and an “existential threat” to academic science. White House spokesman Kush Desai responded that federal research funding is “not a constitutional right.” On August 12 a federal judge ordered UCLA’s NSF grants restored.⁠[25]

On February 21, 2026, Princeton University presented him with the James Madison Medal, which honors distinguished graduate alumni.⁠[3]

In the 2026 King’s Birthday Honours he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), Australia’s highest civilian honor.⁠[5]

On July 24, 2026, he gave the ICM 2026 public lecture “Mathematics in the age of AI,” and on September 11 he was one of 25 initial Fields Medalist signatories of the declaration “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics.”⁠[26]

His popular book Six Math Essentials was published by Quanta Books on October 27, 2026, introducing six core concepts: numbers, algebra, geometry, probability, analysis, and dynamics; a UK edition appeared the same day from Pelican.⁠[27]

As of October 2026 he was a Distinguished Professor and the James and Carol Collins Chair in UCLA’s mathematics department, Director of Special Projects at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, and a co-founder of the Foundation for Science and AI Research (SAIR).⁠[28]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TerenceTao27 (opens in a new window)⁠[24]

UCLA: Official website: https://www.ucla.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[28]

Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics: Official website: https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[28]

Foundation for Science and AI Research: Official website: https://sair.foundation/ (opens in a new window)⁠[29]