Terence Tao

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.

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.

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.

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!