41 Quotes by Terence Tao

I am still very fond of Australia, but my life is now in Los Angeles.

Math education has changed over the years. In the 19th century, they taught spherical trigonometry because one of the biggest applications of mathematics was navigating the ocean. This is no longer so relevant.

In 1992, when I was 16, I moved to the United States to start working on my Ph.D. at Princeton University in New Jersey.

The accuracy of Wikipedia can be dodgy in some places, but in maths, it's really quite good.

Can you make fancy patterns of water that actually have some computation power? I'm betting that fluids are complex enough to do this.

I think one nice thing about mathematics is that we don't really have one prize that dominates all the others, like the Nobel prizes.

I often don't know what I'll be working on next year or a year from now. There is often a chance meeting, or something that I worked on 10 years ago suddenly becomes important again.

When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quieten me down.

It was traditional to not actually cash the prizes that Erdos did award while he was alive. People usually framed the cheque instead.