Terence Tao

Terence Tao is a mathematician who has developed profound insights into a host of difficult areas, including partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, combinatorics, and number theory. He has made significant advances in problems such as Horn’s Conjecture, which he and Allen Knutson showed can be reduced to a geometric combinatorial configuration known as a “honeycomb”; this problem holds deep implications for more abstract mathematical relationships in algebraic combinatorics. Terence Tao was born in Adelaide, Austrailia in 1975 and received an M.Sc. (1992) from Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. (1996) from Princeton University. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught since 1996, when he joined the department as the Hedrick Assistant Professor. He has been a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales (2000) and an honorary professor at Australia National University (2001-2003).