Terence Tao

“It is very humbling to receive the Fields Medal. The words of a Fields Medallist carry a lot of weight within mathematics - for instance, in framing future directions of research - which means that I have to watch what I say more carefully now!”

“I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.”

“When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed.”

“It was traditional to not actually cash the prizes that Erdos did award while he was alive. People usually framed the cheque instead.”

“If I don't understand something properly, every single component, it really bugs me.”

“Math research is more like a marathon.”

“In 1992, when I was 16, I moved to the United States to start working on my Ph.D. at Princeton University in New Jersey.”

“If there is something that I should know how to do but don't, it bugs me. I feel like I have to sit down and work out exactly what the problem is.”

“You want to get to the top of the cliff. But that's not what you focus on immediately. You focus on the next ledge just beyond your reach, because you need to do one clever thing to get up there. And then, once you get there, you do it again. A lot of this is rather boring and not very glamorous. But you can't jump cliffs in a single bound.”

“I don't like accepting things at face value.”

“Can you make fancy patterns of water that actually have some computation power? I'm betting that fluids are complex enough to do this.”

“I enjoy a good meal, a good vacation, or a good movie, much as anyone else would.”

“I often don't know what I'll be working on next year or a year from now. There is often a chance meeting, or something that I worked on 10 years ago suddenly becomes important again.”

“Mathematicians are fairly cheap.”

“If I experiment enough, I get a deeper understanding.”

“Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.”

“The standard high school curriculum traditionally has been focused towards physics and engineering. So calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra have always been the most emphasized, and for good reason - these are very important.”

“I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.”

“One can think of any given axiom system as being like a computer with a certain limited amount of memory or processing power. One could switch to a computer with even more storage, but no matter how large an amount of storage space the computer has, there will still exist some tasks that are beyond its ability.”

“A lot of the math that I do, it's not sort of premeditated. I talk online or with a colleague, and I get interested, and I just follow where it leads.”