Terence Tao

When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed.

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.

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.

If I experiment enough, I get a deeper understanding.

The accuracy of Wikipedia can be dodgy in some places, but in maths, it's really quite good.

I recall being fascinated by numbers even at age three and viewed their manipulation as a kind of game.

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 think one nice thing about mathematics is that we don't really have one prize that dominates all the others, like the Nobel prizes.

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 always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.

I always liked numbers.

I am still very fond of Australia, but my life is now in Los Angeles.