Research and Awards
Tao has won numerous honors and awards. He received the Salem Prize in 2000, the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 2002, and the Clay Research Award in 2003, for his contributions to analysis including work on the Kakeya conjecture and wave maps. In 2005 he received the American Mathematical Society's Levi L. Conant Prize with Allen Knutson, and in 2006 he was awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize.
In 2004, Ben Green and Tao released a preprint proving what is now known as the Green–Tao theorem. This theorem states that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers. The New York Times described it this way:
| “ | In 2004, Dr. Tao, along with Ben Green, a mathematician now at the University of Cambridge in England, solved a problem related to the Twin Prime Conjecture by looking at prime number progressions—series of numbers equally spaced. (For example, 3, 7 and 11 constitute a progression of prime numbers with a spacing of 4; the next number in the sequence, 15, is not prime.) Dr. Tao and Dr. Green proved that it is always possible to find, somewhere in the infinity of integers, a progression of prime numbers of equal spacing and any length. | ” |
For this and other work Tao was awarded the Australian Mathematical Society Medal of 2004.
In August 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, he became one of the youngest persons, the first Australian, and the first UCLA faculty member ever to be awarded a Fields Medal. An article by New Scientist writes of his ability:
| “ | Such is Tao's reputation that mathematicians now compete to interest him in their problems, and he is becoming a kind of Mr Fix-it for frustrated researchers. "If you're stuck on a problem, then one way out is to interest Terence Tao," says Charles Fefferman . | ” |
Tao was a finalist to become Australian of the Year in 2007. He is a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Science, and in 2007 was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the same year Tao also published Tao's inequality, an extension to the Szemerédi regularity lemma in the field of information theory.
In April 2008, Tao received the Alan T. Waterman Award, which recognizes an early career scientist for outstanding contributions in their field. In addition to a medal, Waterman awardees also receive a $500,000 grant for advanced research.
In December 2008, he was named The Lars Onsager lecturer of 2008, for "his combination of mathematical depth, width and volume in a manner unprecedented in contemporary mathematics". He was presented the Onsager Medal, and held his Lars Onsager lecture entitled "Structure and randomness in the prime numbers" at NTNU, Norway.
Tao was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.
In 2010, he received the King Faisal International Prize jointly with Enrico Bombieri. Also in 2010, he was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics along with the Polya Prize (SIAM). Tao and Van H. Vu solved the circular law conjecture.
Tao also made contributions to the study of the Erdős–Straus conjecture in 2011 by showing that the number of solutions to the Erdős–Straus equation increases polylogarithmically as n tends to infinity.
In 2012 he and Jean Bourgain received the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He proved that every odd integer greater than 1 is the sum of at most five primes
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Sciences (Corresponding Member), the National Academy of Sciences (Foreign member), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006, he received the Fields Medal "for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory", and in 2007, he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship. He has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, Popular Science, and many other media outlets.
As of 2011 Tao has published over 230 research papers.
Read more about this topic: Terence Tao
Famous quotes containing the word research:
“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?” [Was will das Weib?]”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)