Terence Tao

Terence Chi-Shen Tao (born July 17, 1975, in Adelaide, South Australia) is an Australian-American mathematician and professor of mathematics at UCLA. A child prodigy who competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad at age ten and won gold, he earned his doctorate from Princeton University under Elias Stein and became UCLA's youngest full professor at age 24 in 1999. His research spans harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations, and additive number theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2006 for this work, and is known for the Green-Tao theorem, proved with Ben Green, which shows that the prime numbers contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. He has also received the MacArthur Fellowship and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, and is widely regarded as one of the leading mathematicians of his generation.