Math Prodigy Terence Tao, UCLA

We have never had a Fuse Medal before at UCLA. I'm happy for him, first of all, but I'm also happy for UCLA. It's often been referred to as the Nobel Prize in Mathematics because there's no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. It's better, in a way, than the Nobel Prize because they only give one every four years. So it's not given to just one result. It's really the whole career up to that point. Terry Tao was a prodigy in Mathematics. He was like a Mozart. As long as I can remember, I always enjoyed Math. My parents told me that at age two, I was trying to teach other kids to count using these alphabet and number blocks. So here's Terry doing great Mathematics problems at age eight or nine, doing college work at age 12. He got a 760 on the Math SAT, but that's at age eight. He won the Math Olympiad when he was 13, and it's an international, worldwide competition. He got a PhD at age 21 at Princeton. And then I came to UCLA. There were people here I wanted to work with, like John Burnett, for instance, and the weather was sunnier than Princeton. Math is a very collaborative and cumulative process, and you really do get the sense that each century, each decade, each year, you're building another layer on top. Prime numbers were one of the first things studied in number theory by the ancient Greeks. They were sort of the epitome of pure mathematics. There was sort of no use for primes because nowadays primes are extremely important in cryptography. Your credit card, your ATM machine, and so forth, is secure because of large prime numbers. He began in a subject called Harmonic Analysis, the area I'm in, and so that's why we're connected. He's so enormously talented that he branched out into very many other areas very quickly. He's enormously gifted. He has a way of seeing through problems more quickly than anyone else. I would love to have a Eureka moment, actually. In order to do that, you have to come up with the wrong idea, work on it for a month, realize it doesn't work, come up with the next wrong idea, and then finally, by process of elimination, find something that works. The best graduate students around the world, in number theory, want to come to UCLA to work with Terry. Finally understanding how something works, how something really works, a quick moment is really satisfying, and you feel smarter. In a way, you can think of this as, like, John Wooden at UCLA as a basketball coach. You know, people want to come because they think they can be better themselves. They want to work with the best. I would say at the present time, he's the best mathematician in the world. I go around, I travel around the world, and I'm known as the dean where Terry Tao works. That's how I'm known, okay? UCL is known as the place where Terry Tao works. I'd love to see that happen in my lifetime, and the stuff that I do will become the foundation of the next generation of people to carry on.