World Scientific Author Wins Fields Medal
At 31, Professor Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles is one of the youngest mathematicians to be awarded the prestigious Fields Medal. Awarded once every 4 years by the International Mathematical Union, the Fields Medal recognizes Profesor Tao for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory. The award was presented in Madrid on August 22, 2006 by Spain's King Juan Carlos I at a congress attended by 4000 international mathematicians.
Professor Tao's peers know him as a "supreme problem-solver" who has made breakthroughs in areas including wave motion and prime numbers - which have applications in fibre optics and information security. At UCLA, he is part of the Analysis group and actively maintains a Harmonic Analysis web site as well as a Harmonics Mailing List.
The Australian-born child prodigy in Calculus graduated from Flinders University when he was only 16 and received his PhD in Mathematics from Princeton University when he was 21. With work spanning across several Mathematical fields, he has written over 80 research papers in areas ranging from harmonic analysis, nonlinear partial differential equations, and combinatorics. His thesis, "Three Regularity Results in Harmonic Analysis" appears in the review volume Topics in Analysis and its Applications edited by R Coifman (Yale University).
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