![]() In 1996, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1992 to 1996, Tao was a graduate student at Princeton University under the direction of Elias Stein, receiving his PhD at the age of 21. In 1992, he won a Postgraduate Fulbright Scholarship to undertake research in mathematics at Princeton University in the United States. In 1991, he received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the age of 16 from Flinders University under the direction of Garth Gaudry. When he was 15, he published his first assistant paper. ![]() He remains the youngest winner of each of the three medals in the Olympiad's history, winning a gold medal at the age of 13 in 1988.Īt age 14, Tao attended the Research Science Institute. Tao was the youngest participant to date in the International Mathematical Olympiad, first competing at the age of ten in 1986, 1987, and 1988, he won a bronze, silver, and gold medal, respectively. Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth stated that he had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching. He is one of only two children in the history of the Johns Hopkins' Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just eight years old Tao scored a 760. ![]() But an exceptional amount of intelligence has almost no bearing on whether one is an exceptional mathematician.Ī child prodigy, Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. To summarise: as I said in the main article, a reasonable amount of intelligence is certainly a necessary (though not sufficient) condition to be a reasonable mathematician. In athletics, the best sprinters can often be lousy marathon runners, and the same is largely true in mathematics. In a third direction, a very quick thinker may be able to pick up new ideas rapidly, to find snappy rejoinders to any question, and to complete tests and examinations in a remarkably short amount of time, but these attributes may in fact lead to excessive frustration when such a student encounters a genuine research problem for the first time – one that requires months of patient and systematic effort, starting with existing literature and model problems, identifying and then investigating promising avenues of attack, and so forth. geometry, motion, symmetry, information, etc.) there is a risk of an excessively intelligent student getting overly enchanted with the formalism and esotericism of a subject, and neglecting to keep his or her knowledge grounded in reality (and to communicate it effectively with others). Similarly, a very intelligent person may be very comfortable with abstract concepts and abstruse reasoning, and a certain amount of this can indeed be an asset when learning some of the more theory-intensive portions of mathematics, but at some point one has to be able to digest this theory and connect it with more mundane, “common sense” concepts (e.g. Indeed, being overly creative at the expense of true mathematical skill may in fact impede one’s progress on a mathematical research problem, due to all the time wasted on the ninety-eight hopeless avenues. For instance, a very creative person may have a hundred innovative ways to attack a mathematical problem, but what one really needs is the rigorous thinking, comparison with existing literature, intuition and experience, and knowledge of heuristics in order to winnow these hundred ways down to the two that actually have a non-zero chance of working. ![]() More generally, the skills and traits that are popularly associated with “intelligence” or “genius” become largely decoupled, after a certain point, to those that are needed to do good mathematics. In professional mathematics, at least, we don’t brag about our IQs, put them in our cv’s, or try to find out other mathematician’s IQ when trying to evaluate them it has about as much relevance in our profession as the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator. It is strange that IQ has such a hold over the popular imagination, because as far as I can tell it plays no role in academia whatsoever.
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