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Terence Tao is the James and Carol Collins Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a position he has held since 2007, and has been a full professor there since 2000. Born on July 17, 1975, in Adelaide, Australia, he demonstrated extraordinary talent early, winning bronze and silver medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1986 and 1987, respectively, and a gold medal in 1988. Tao completed his BSc (Hons) in Mathematics at Flinders University in December 1991, followed by an MSc in Mathematics in August 1992 from the same institution under advisor Garth Gaudry. He earned his PhD in Mathematics from Princeton University in June 1996, advised by Elias Stein, with the thesis "Three regularity results in harmonic analysis." His early career included roles as Assistant Researcher at Flinders Medical Centre (1992-1994) and Princeton University (1993-1994), Hedrick Assistant Professor at UCLA (1996-1998), and Acting Assistant Professor at UCLA in 1999, along with visiting positions at UNSW and ANU.
Tao's research interests encompass a broad range of areas in mathematics, primarily harmonic analysis, partial differential equations (PDE), geometric combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, analytic number theory, ergodic theory, operator theory, random matrix theory, and compressed sensing. He has authored or co-authored over 300 research papers and several influential books, including "Solving Mathematical Problems: A Personal Perspective" (Oxford University Press, 2006), "Analysis I" and "Analysis II" (Hindustan Book Agency, 2006), "Additive Combinatorics" with Van Vu (Cambridge University Press, 2006), "Higher Order Fourier Analysis" (American Mathematical Society, 2012), and "Topics in Random Matrix Theory" (American Mathematical Society, 2012). Notable publications include "The primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions" with Ben Green (Annals of Mathematics, 2008), groundbreaking work on the Green-Tao theorem proving infinitely many primes in arithmetic progressions of any length; compressed sensing papers such as "Robust uncertainty principles: Exact signal reconstruction from highly incomplete frequency information" with Emmanuel Candès (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2006); and contributions to nonlinear dispersive equations like "Global well-posedness and scattering in the energy space for the critical nonlinear Schrödinger equation in R^3" (Annals of Mathematics, 2007). His honors include the Salem Prize (2000), MacArthur Fellowship (2007-2011), Ostrowski Prize (2007), SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2006), Royal Medal (2014), Janos Bolyai Prize (2020), Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2020), Grande Médaille of the French Academy of Sciences (2023), and the James Madison Medal (2026). Tao serves as an editor or associate editor for multiple mathematical journals, held the James and Carol Collins Chair since 2007, and was a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology from 2020 to 2024. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Australian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with profound influence on harmonic analysis, combinatorics, and PDE.
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