Terence Tao, Ph.D.

Professor, University of California, Los AngelesTerence Tao’s website

Terry Tao is one of the most universal, penetrating and prolific mathematicians in the world. In over 200 publications (in just 15 years) spanning collaborations with nearly 70 mathematicians, he has established himself as a major player in the disparate fields of harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, number theory, random matrices, and more. He has made deep contributions to the development of additive combinatorics through a blend of harmonic analysis, ergodic theory, geometry and number theory, establishing this field as central to the modern study of many mathematical subjects. This work has led to extraordinary breakthroughs in our understanding of the distribution of primes, expanders in groups, and various questions in theoretical computer science. For example, Green, Tao, and Ziegler have proved that any finite set of linear forms over the integers, of which no two are linearly dependent over the rationals, all take on prime values simultaneously infinitely often, provided there are no local obstructions.

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