Really: It’s just a side effect that he got the Fields medal.
I don’t know him personally, but I know several (unrelated) people personally who worked with him, and based on their stories + information available on the internet I was equally impressed by him before this medal event...
That guy simply has an impeccable record of achievements from age two on (disregarding a lot of other prizes)
age 2: Teaching himself arithmetics (from Sesame Streets)
8: Scoring 760 on SAT in Mathamatics
10: Winning bronze medal at International Mathematical Olympiad
13: Winning gold medal at International Mathematical Olympiad
17: Master in Mathematics
20: PhD
24: Full Professor at UCLA
31: Fields Medal
34(now) 140+ publications and 9 books in various different fields of mathematics, like: harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, geometric combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, analytic number theory, algebraic combinatorics and representation theory.
I challange you to name your candidates… ;)
There are an awful lot of great thinkers, but really rare are those kind of human beings that appear to belong to a different species.
Well, I know very little about Terry Tao, so I’m going to say everyone else who’s ever won a Fields Medal.
Not all Fields medalists are made equal… :)
Really: It’s just a side effect that he got the Fields medal.
I don’t know him personally, but I know several (unrelated) people personally who worked with him, and based on their stories + information available on the internet I was equally impressed by him before this medal event...
That guy simply has an impeccable record of achievements from age two on (disregarding a lot of other prizes)
age 2: Teaching himself arithmetics (from Sesame Streets)
8: Scoring 760 on SAT in Mathamatics
10: Winning bronze medal at International Mathematical Olympiad
13: Winning gold medal at International Mathematical Olympiad
17: Master in Mathematics
20: PhD
24: Full Professor at UCLA
31: Fields Medal
34(now) 140+ publications and 9 books in various different fields of mathematics, like: harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, geometric combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, analytic number theory, algebraic combinatorics and representation theory.