Terence Tao
Professor of Mathematics, UCLA
About
Terence Tao is a mathematician at UCLA widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians. Born in Adelaide, Australia, he was a child prodigy who earned his PhD from Princeton at age 21 and became UCLA's youngest-ever full professor at 24. He received the Fields Medal in 2006, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, and the Royal Medal for his contributions spanning harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, combinatorics, and additive number theory. He has authored over 300 research papers and actively explores the role of AI in mathematics, including formal proof verification with tools like Lean.
Key Contributions
- Won the 2006 Fields Medal for work spanning harmonic analysis, PDEs, combinatorics, and number theory
- Co-proved the Green-Tao theorem, showing arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in the primes
- Made major contributions to compressed sensing, dispersive PDEs, random matrices, and additive combinatorics
- Built an unusually open mathematical practice through his blog, lecture notes, expository writing, and collaborative problem solving
- Experiments publicly with proof assistants and AI tools such as Lean, Claude, and formalization workflows
- His AI optimism is grounded in practice, but he repeatedly stresses that current systems still need mathematical judgment and verification
Videos & Interviews
Terence Tao and Mark Chen - Fireside Chat with James Donovan - IPAM at UCLA
Fireside chat exploring the future of AI in mathematics at the OpenAI × UCLA IPAM convening
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Formalizing a proof in Lean using Claude Code
Tao demonstrates using Claude Code to formalize a mathematical proof in the Lean proof assistant
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Terence Tao – AI is still brute force but it will revolutionize experimental math
Tao on how AI, despite being brute force, will transform experimental mathematics
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The Potential for AI in Science and Mathematics
Oxford Mathematics public lecture on how AI could transform scientific and mathematical research
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