I was never very good at school with... humanities... anything which was more a matter of opinion.
Terence Tao
I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.
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 enjoy a good meal, a good vacation, or a good movie, much as anyone else would.
When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quieten me down.
Most students who take math classes aren't going to be mathematicians. They're going to be engineers, statisticians - in many ways, that's the more important mission of math education.
If I don't understand something properly, every single component, it really bugs me.
Math research is more like a marathon.
It was traditional to not actually cash the prizes that Erdos did award while he was alive. People usually framed the cheque instead.
Talent is important, but how one develops and nurtures it is even more so.
The accuracy of Wikipedia can be dodgy in some places, but in maths, it's really quite good.
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.
I always liked numbers.
I tend to change research direction every few years or so.
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.
I have been lucky to find very good collaborators who have taught me a lot, have introduced me to several new fields of mathematics, or have shown me new insights.
I recall being fascinated by numbers even at age three and viewed their manipulation as a kind of game.
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.
I think one nice thing about mathematics is that we don't really have one prize that dominates all the others, like the Nobel prizes.
When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed.
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.
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.
If I experiment enough, I get a deeper understanding.
There might be a hidden structure in pi that we simply haven't discovered.
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.
I don't have any magical ability. I look at a problem, play with it, work out a strategy.
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.
Most of what I do does not save lives.
When you're concentrating hard, hours can fly by, and it's just you and a math problem.
For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others.
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.
I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.
My life is more than just my work. I am a husband and a father and a proud citizen of two countries: my homeland of Australia and my adopted country here in the United States.
I am still very fond of Australia, but my life is now in Los Angeles.
Math education has changed over the years. In the 19th century, they taught spherical trigonometry because one of the biggest applications of mathematics was navigating the ocean. This is no longer so relevant.
Can you make fancy patterns of water that actually have some computation power? I'm betting that fluids are complex enough to do this.
Mathematicians are fairly cheap.
What interests me is the connection between maths and the real world.
I don't like accepting things at face value.
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!
