Grown up child genius adds highest maths award to honours
Published: August 22, 2006
A FORMER child genius who completed high school mathematics at the age of eight and had two university degrees at 17 has won mathematics’ highest honour, the Fields medal, becoming the first Australian to do so.
Terry Tao, 31, who was made a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, at 24, swept all before him at primary school, high school and university in Adelaide before embarking onan international academic career that has awed mathematicians decades his senior. The Fields medal is the mathematician’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, which carries no award for the discipline.
It is awarded for a body of work rather than a single achievement but Professor Tao is most recently celebrated for showing, with Ben Green of Cambridge, that there are long strings of prime numbers a constant distance apart, work that is important for the coding ofinformation such as banking details.
One of his early mentors, Garth Gaudry of the University ofMelbourne’s International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics, described his charge as “completely off thescale”.
Professor Gaudry started tutoring Professor Tao when the prodigy was 12. “He had had a few local tutors up to Year 12 maths and his father realised that Terry had exhausted them; they’d run out of steam with any decent material they could offer him,” Professor Gaudry told The Australian.
“I very rapidly found that he was just completely off the scale. His insight and brilliance just frankly staggered me.”
King Juan Carlos of Spain presented Professor Tao with hismedal at a ceremony in Madrid last night during the International Congress of Mathematicians.
Professor Tao is the son of Billy, an Adelaide pediatrician who took an active interest in his first son’s early education, and Grace, a former high school maths and physics teacher.
Dr Tao said his son showed rare insight at age two, when he showed the older children of Tao family friends how to count using blocks. Professor Tao has two younger brothers. Trevor, 29, is an autistic savant with degrees in music and a PhD in applied mathematics. He works for the Defence Science Technology Organisation.
Nigel, 27, has maths, economics and computer engineering degrees and works for internet search company Google in Sydney.
Professor Tao said of his win: “I haven’t had an award like this before, so I don’t know how it will affect (my career).
“I’m trying to focus on continuing my research and other work, such as advising graduate students.”
The Fields medal, named after Canadian mathematician John Charles Field (1863-1932), was first awarded in 1936 and is given once every four years to two or four recipients.
This year’s other winners are Russians Andrei Okounkov and Grigori Perelman and French-German Wendelin Werner.
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