Childhood prodigy and the Gross study
Terence Tao was born on July 17, 1975, in Adelaide, South Australia, to parents who had emigrated from Hong Kong — a paediatrician and a mathematics teacher. By two he was reportedly teaching arithmetic to older children; by five he was reading at a college level. His parents kept him in regular school while letting him advance freely by subject.
In 1985, aged 9, he was tested by psychologist Miraca Gross for her longitudinal study of exceptionally gifted children. The Stanford-Binet result of about 230 was published in her 1992 paper and again in her 2003 book Exceptionally Gifted Children.
Education, measured against the usual age
Each bar compares Tao's age at a milestone (violet) with the age most students reach it (grey).
Began attending secondary classes part-time at about 7, studying ahead in maths and physics.
Began university mathematics and physics courses at 9, alongside school.
Bronze at 10, silver at 11 and gold at 13 — then the youngest gold medallist ever.
Bachelor of Science with honours.
Master's thesis on convolution operators, supervised by Garth Gaudry.
Thesis “Three regularity results in harmonic analysis”, advised by Elias Stein.
Promoted at 24 — the youngest person ever appointed to a full professorship there.
Mathematical contributions
Tao's work spans harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, additive combinatorics, ergodic theory, analytic number theory and random matrix theory. He has also contributed to compressed sensing and the Navier–Stokes regularity problem.
His best-known result, the Green–Tao theorem, says the primes contain arithmetic progressions of any length — evenly spaced runs like 5, 11, 17, 23, 29. Try it:
He received the Fields Medal and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006, the Crafoord Prize in 2012, and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 2014.
The 230 in context
Tao's score is rare because it was published with full methodology — the items, the testing environment and the conversion — rather than reported in the press. Most famous IQ figures rest on anecdote.
The usual caveats still apply. The ratio formula produces very large numbers for precocious children that don't map to adult deviation scores. Gross's subjects “regress” in adulthood not because ability declines but because the metric changes.
Tao is modest about the figure. He stresses work, mentorship and luck, and says talent without sustained effort doesn't produce mathematics.
Public engagement and mentorship
His blog, “What's new”, has run since 2007 as a public lab for half-formed ideas, problems and teaching posts, and he answers comments from students and amateurs alike. He has led several of the most productive Polymath projects — open, blog-based collaborations first proposed by Timothy Gowers.
Personal life and current work
Tao has been at UCLA since 1996, where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in Mathematics. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Laura, an electrical engineer he met at Princeton, and their two children.
He has published more than 400 papers. Recent interests include additive combinatorics, problems between analysis and computer science, and how proof assistants like Lean and AI tools might support — not replace — mathematical research.
Selected complete works, by field
He has 400+ papers; these are the landmark results and books. Filter by area.
A book on olympiad problem-solving written when he was 15.
Used “honeycombs” to prove Horn's conjecture on eigenvalues of sums of matrices.
The primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions; published in Annals of Mathematics in 2008.
Showed sparse signals can be rebuilt from far fewer measurements than thought — now used in MRI scanning.
A standard graduate text for the field.
Undergraduate real-analysis textbooks built from his UCLA teaching.
Graduate text drawn from his blog lecture notes.
Solved an 80-year-old question of Paul Erdős, building on a Polymath project.
Showed an averaged version of the equations can blow up — evidence of how hard the real problem is.
Proved Λ ≥ 0, confirming a conjecture linked to the Riemann hypothesis.
Proved almost all Collatz orbits attain almost bounded values — the strongest result yet on the problem.
In his words
“I don't have any magical ability. I look at a problem, and it looks something like one I've done before.”
“Progress in mathematics often takes the form of finding the right perspective for a problem.”
“Tao is the Mozart of math.”
Timeline
- 1975Born in Adelaide, South Australia.
- 1985Tested by Miraca Gross at age 9. Stanford-Binet ≈230.
- 1996Joins the UCLA faculty.
- 2008Elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.
- 2014Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.
- 2026James and Carol Collins Chair in Mathematics, UCLA.
References
- Gross, M. U. M. (1992). “The early development of three profoundly gifted children of IQ 200.” In To Be Young and Gifted, ed. Klein & Tannenbaum
- Gross, M. U. M. (2003). Exceptionally Gifted Children. Routledge
- International Mathematical Union, Fields Medal citation (2006)
- MacArthur Foundation Fellowship press release (2006)
- Cook, G. (2015). “The Singular Mind of Terry Tao.” New York Times Magazine, July 26
- Tao, T. (2006–present). “What's new” blog, terrytao.wordpress.com
- Tao, T. (2006). Solving Mathematical Problems: A Personal Perspective. Oxford
- Green, B. & Tao, T. (2008). “The primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions.” Annals of Mathematics 167