Terence Tao

Childhood prodigy and the Gross study

Terence Tao was born July 17, 1975 in Adelaide, South Australia, to Chinese-born parents who had immigrated from Hong Kong. By age 2 he was reportedly teaching arithmetic to older children. By age 5 he was reading at college level. His parents - a pediatrician and a mathematics teacher - made the unusual decision to keep him in the regular school system while allowing him to advance freely across subjects.

In 1985, at age 9, he was tested by Australian psychologist Miraca Gross as part of her longitudinal study of "exceptionally gifted" children. The Stanford-Binet score of approximately 230 was published in her 1992 paper "The early development of three profoundly gifted children of IQ 200," and again in her broader 2003 monograph Exceptionally Gifted Children. This makes Tao's number one of the very few "famous" IQ figures backed by a peer-reviewed psychometric study with full methodology disclosure.

He took university-level mathematics courses at age 9, completed his bachelor's degree at 16, his master's at 17 (Flinders University), and his PhD at 20 (Princeton, under Elias Stein). His dissertation was on harmonic analysis and the Kakeya conjecture, a topic that remained central to his work for the following two decades.

Mathematical contributions

Tao's work spans an unusually broad range of mathematical subjects: harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, additive combinatorics, ergodic theory, analytic number theory, and random matrix theory. His best-known result is the Green-Tao theorem (2004, joint with Ben Green), which proved that the prime numbers contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions - resolving a question open since Erdős.

He has also contributed to compressed sensing, the structure theory of approximate groups, and the global regularity of incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. His blog "What's new" is widely read by working mathematicians and includes both research-level expositions and pedagogy. His 2006-2007 lectures on additive combinatorics are a standard reference.

He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2006 (at age 31), the MacArthur Fellowship the same year, the Crafoord Prize in 2012, and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 2014. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 and made an Australian citizen-of-the-year in 2007.

The 230 figure in context

Tao's 230 score has the unusual property of being academically published with full methodology, not merely reported in press. Gross's study described the Stanford-Binet administration in detail, including the items, the testing environment, and the conversion calculation. This is rare: most "famous" IQ figures come via biographical anecdote rather than peer-reviewed psychometric documentation.

Even so, the same caveats apply that apply to all childhood ratio-IQ scores at the extreme range. The Stanford-Binet ratio-IQ formula produces large numbers for highly precocious children that do not translate to comparable adult deviation-IQ scores. Gross's subjects, including Tao, regress toward the mean in adulthood not because their cognitive ability declines but because the metric changes.

Tao himself has been characteristically modest about the figure. In interviews he has emphasized the role of work, mentorship, and luck in his career, and has noted that "talent" without sustained effort does not produce mathematical contributions. He maintains his blog precisely because he believes mathematical work is more open and collaborative than the lone-genius story suggests.

Public engagement and mentorship

Tao has been notable for his accessibility as a senior mathematician. His blog "What's new" has been continuously active since 2007 and serves as a kind of public laboratory for half-formed ideas, problem statements, and pedagogical posts. He responds to comments from PhD students and amateur mathematicians on a level that is unusual at his career stage.

He has been involved in formal mathematics outreach including Polymath, the collaborative open-mathematics project. The Polymath approach - groups of mathematicians collaborating openly on a problem via blog comments - was conceived by Timothy Gowers but has had several of its most productive projects led by Tao.

He is a co-author of multiple textbooks including Analysis I and Analysis II (Hindustan Book Agency), An Introduction to Measure Theory, and Topics in Random Matrix Theory. The Analysis textbooks are widely used at the upper-undergraduate level and reflect his belief that careful, motivated exposition is part of the discipline.

Personal life and current work

Tao has been at UCLA since 1996, where he is 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 Australian citizenship by birth and U.S. citizenship by naturalization.

His current research interests, as of recent publications, include polymath collaborations on additive combinatorics, problems at the intersection of analysis and computer science, and the AI-mathematics collaboration question - including how proof-assistant tools like Lean and AI tools like GPT might supplement (not replace) mathematical research.

He has published over 400 research papers and is among the most-cited working mathematicians by any measure. The Tao-related body of conjectures, theorems, and techniques now spans enough subfields that "the Green-Tao theorem" or "Tao's structure theorem" no longer specifies a single result.

Timeline

• 1975Born in Adelaide, South Australia.
• 1980Begins arithmetic at age 5; reads at college level.
• 1984Takes high-school mathematics at age 9.
• 1985Tested by Miraca Gross. Stanford-Binet IQ reported as approximately 230.
• 1986Wins bronze medal at International Mathematical Olympiad at age 10.
• 1988Wins gold at IMO at age 13 - then youngest gold medalist in history.
• 1991Bachelor's degree, Flinders University.
• 1996PhD, Princeton University. Joins UCLA faculty.
• 2004Green-Tao theorem on arithmetic progressions in the primes.
• 2006Fields Medal. MacArthur Fellowship. Australian Citizen of the Year (2007).
• 2012Crafoord Prize in Mathematics.
• 2014Royal Medal of the Royal Society. Breakthrough Prize.
• 2026Continues as James and Carol Collins Chair in Mathematics at UCLA.

Frequently asked questions

Comparable scorers