Terence Tao: The World Greatest Mathematician

Some excerpts about the biography and achievement of Terence Tao, or Terry, as he's mostly known, from the major newspapers from the past 9 years:

March 7, 2015

Terence Tao: the Mozart of maths from The Sydney Morning Herald

When he was nine, Tao commenced part-time studies in mathematics at Flinders University. By the time he was 16, he'd finished his science degree. He got his masters when he was 17 and his PhD at Princeton University at 20.

"He is arguably the world's best mathematician," says Joseph Rudnick, the dean of Physical Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Tao, now 39, has been a mathematics professor since he was 24. "Other mathematicians speak of him in tones of awe." His talents, says Rudnick, are "other-worldly".

Tao has pages of awards, fellowships, prizes and medals to his name - most notably, the Fields Medal, the maths world's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, which he received in 2006 when he was 31 "for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory". Around about then, people started to describe him as "the Mozart of math".