An Interview with Terence Tao

[Music] my friends call me terry uh i guess professionally dr tau is fine all right amazing so dr tao what first drew you to math uh so i've always liked math as long as i can remember uh my parents told me uh when i was two i don't remember this myself but they said that when when i was two they found me at a friend's place um trying to teach some older kids like maybe like five or six how to count using these number blocks um and they asked me how i where i learned this because they hadn't taught me they said apparently i learned it from watching sesame street so i don't remember that um the earliest memory i have that's math related was when i was maybe about three or four my grandmother was washing the windows in my house and i asked her to put the detergent on the um windows in the shape of numbers so i you know do a three to a four so i always like numbers and patterns and games uh those and these sort of things um i didn't know until a lot uh later that uh that there it was like useful for something i just enjoyed i enjoyed doing math um my parents you know when i was restless like when i was seven or eight if i was too noisy at night they would give me a math workbook and i'll just go and and and do all the sums and products and long division i just liked working with numbers that's very interesting so is there someone you would owe your mathematical talent to uh so my mother was a high school math teacher so she was the first person who taught me some maths later on um so of course i had some very good teachers in high school i actually my physics teacher in high school was was uh was a lot of fun actually but there was a retired mass professor in my in my hometown so when i was around 10 or 11 my parents were taking me there um and uh on sundays we will just have the tea with cookies and he will just talk about um some math puzzles he had come up with or he talked about uh the math he used he he fought in the war world war ii um and uh you know he did ballistics and things like that and uh so um it was just nice to see maths out of a uh outside of a uh school environment um i sort of did a lot of uh math competitions uh these olympiads um yeah that's a lot of fun yeah uh so as a teenager what did you want to be um so i didn't know for the longest time that actually you could you could be a mathematician i didn't realize that this was a job so when people ask you what i wanted to do i thought about it and i said maybe a shopkeeper because you know i have to you know do all these sums to balance the books and this i think i know how to do um i really had no idea what what math was used for that's um interesting like you would do anything to just do math you would become anything just to do the math right um well that was what i was good at you know i've never been any good at sports or or singing or acting or anything so um yeah yeah i i had no idea but i had very good advisors so my my uh undergraduate uh uh advisor when i was in undergraduate college advised me to go study abroad and so i i went to um the u.s to study in princeton and then my phd advisor you know i was thinking just going back back to um australia and uh actually i wasn't really thinking about what to do but but uh but he strongly recommended i i also apply internationally i got a job at ucla that's amazing yeah and i've been there ever since i really like it here okay so what advice would you give to teenagers that are interested in stem and math uh well um in some ways it's a great time to uh to be interested because there's so many resources now um you know the internet has got so many uh videos and and and web pages and even wikipedia is excellent you know when i was growing up you know basically it was a local library and if you're lucky uh some retired professor you could talk to um but but now you know there's still at least internet communities so um and it's it's it's a lot easier i think especially in the developing world to to catch up if you want to do research level mathematics it used to be that you have to go to a top university because there are certain latest developments that you can only get by talking to certain people in certain universities but but now you can just go online and you know you can you can zoom like resuming now um so there's a lot of opportunity um but uh you have to be motivated i mean uh you know so the internet has got all these resources but but uh you can't just you know you have to actually go look for them um yeah so you need uh to find your passion um and uh usually it starts with a really good teacher uh who somehow gets you on the right path finds you uh matches you with something that you really like doing so what's by far the coolest thing you've learned in maths frankly i've learned uh huh um that's a funny thing because um the thing about math is it's like kind of like a crossword puzzle you know like um if if you work very hard on a crossfit puzzle this is clue and you have no idea what uh what the answer is and you think the answer must be something really clever and and and and sophisticated but when you find it it's usually just obvious oh what did i think of that student so every idea you know i mean it's sort of uh it may be surprising at the time but it becomes obvious after a while i mean just to give one very simple example i mean the the concept of zero the the number zero right it was uh um it was only invented in what that uh the first millennium okay by the uh actually by the indians and then the arabs um and before them they didn't have a constitutional zero you know so um you know through the romans uh only knew how to come from one forward they didn't have zero didn't have negative numbers um and it was a big sort of psychological uh trick that you can think about more numbers than just the numbers you can count your fingers zero and the negative negative numbers and then fractions and complex numbers and and in math there's so many abstract objects now that are just sort of massive generalizations of of things like numbers and shapes and books so they're very basic concepts that have become extremely abstract but once you are familiar with them they're not so such a big deal anymore you know they're like zeros is it's huge as zero like it's it's nothing um you know it's no big deal yeah that's understandable yeah so what's one thing no one knows about your relationship with math uh no one knows i don't know um i mean it's you know it's just as hard for me as everybody else you know so um the thing about maps research is that you you work on various problems and sometimes you sell them sometimes you don't uh but you only publish the ones that you solve so if you only read the publications of somebody it looks like they do they do nothing but they're always winning you know that it's like uh you know if everyone is uh you know something they're always batting you know perfectly um but uh um but what actually happens is that it is hitting this i mean there's lots of things i've tried it doesn't work um but i don't i don't share this you know these things often with people um there were a couple times where i've run some math research projects on the internet there are these collaborative math research project called polymath projects where you get a whole bunch of people um it's open it's completely open anyone can join um and everyone um there's a single math problem and and everyone just throws out ideas and sometimes they work sometimes they don't and then someone says oh that idea doesn't work but you inspired me to try this thing and this seems to make more progress and bit by bit you you work and solving the problem um and i've participated in a couple of these a couple of these a lot of fun but um when you do those uh you you show everything so you show all the things that work and all things that don't work um yeah um the feedback i've gotten when um when these projects ended uh it's like graduate students when they follow these projects they they were they were amazed to learn that even like senior mathematicians when they work on a problem they make just as many mistakes and and and sort of wrong turns as as as they do yes so when you're more experienced you are much better at finding out that you made a wrong turn and fixing it sooner um and also learning how to change it how to how to extracting the parts that did work and then incorporating that into into some better argument but we still make blossoms lots of mistakes um so that's something nobody knows about you that you also make mistakes um well not okay anyone who's actually worked with me knows that okay and my wife certainly knows that um but yeah i i think uh like if it's someone that's only like read my paper sort of only read about me or something they may not all right so what topic do you dislike in math and why i dislike um well there's certainly parts of math i'm not good at um so there is a mess like like topology which uh i struggle with um and if i i mean yeah i i um i can force myself to use certain arizona i don't like if i have to um sometimes math can get very messy um so this is sometimes the only way to solve a problem is just to divide it up into like 20 cases and just check off each case one by one um and you have to do it because you want the problem solved but it's it's it's messy and disgusting um but well sometimes this motivates you to find a better way to do it um or sometimes they're more for somebody else to clean it up um you know actually it's actually a really good feeling when you work really hard on a problem and then somebody else finds a much better way to do it okay and you know they um they cite you of course but it it actually makes you feel better that you know you all all this time you were spending actually you realized you it wasn't actually uh the right way to do it um but i don't know there's no piece of math i really hate uh yeah but there's this this particular tedious um and you know and even the parts i don't like i can often work with somebody who likes that parts more so you know often you collaborate now so mathematics is very collaborative uh almost every project i do is joined with somebody else um and uh often you have complementary skills so you know if you don't like quan para mas the other person will be happy to to take care of that power for you all right so could you give us a broad overview of your work um okay so um i work in a lot of areas of mathematics but uh the the general fuel i work in this analysis um i guess the uh well okay well what i actually work in changes from year to year i get interested in different things um so um in the past few years i've been very interested in in number theory um studying things like the primes uh i've always been interested in in the prime numbers trying to find new uh um so the paranormals are supposed to be distributed very very randomly in various ways um and i'm trying to find ways to to make that precise um and it's tough the primes are a very stubborn beast to control i mean we we we think we know what they should be doing but it's very hard to prove anything about them um i've played a lot recently with fluid equations the equations that govern things like water i'm trying to construct special solutions these equations that do funny things i want to make water do tricks uh okay i like you know make them sort of blow up or something um but um now i play different things all the time so like right now i'm working on a problem in an area called complex analysis which i got interested in because i was teaching a class at this quarter and so i started learning about some some problems in this area and i got interested in them um yeah i mean the great thing about being a pure mathematician is is that you can pick the problems you work on you just follow what looks interesting or what it looks like it's it's promising um it's a bit like fishing you know you um you don't know exactly what fish you you'll get but you know there are certain parts of the river where where you uh it looks like there's a lot of fish in there so if you cast a line and you and you wait you should get something um and if it doesn't work you go to a different part of the river and you try there instead that's a very interesting analogy yeah uh so what's your favorite movie or tv show or and why my favorite movie um actually it's kind of a silly one it's uh um it's called galaxy quest um so uh so it's a it's sort of an homage to these star trek movies okay so star trek is of course this huge phenomenon and um there are all these star trek fans called trekkies who are very obsessed about every little detail of star trek um and so um galaxy quest is this comedy so it's it's about these actors who are acting in um something like star trek it's their version of star trek um but they get kidnapped by aliens who believe they actually are sort of starship captains and so forth and because they need they did um the aliens are trying to recruit them to fight some other aliens um and it's it's just a hilarious movie um and so it's it's a satire or parody of star trek but it's it's it's so um it's a very loving parody i mean they they uh it's clear that the um the people who wrote this this movie are big very big fans of star trek so so even though they make fun of every single sort of cliche in those movies uh they actually make it anyways they make a better star trek movie than the actual star trek movies so like if you look at rankings of like the top the top 10 star trek movies galaxy quizzes normally up there like in the top five they just consider like an honorary star trek movie anyway uh that's my favorite movie so you and you aren't a star trek fan uh i like star trek i mean i i know people who are really really into star trek um so i mean i i know that i can recognize what they're parodying um so i mean the normal star trek movies are okay but this particular movie was just really nice it's got really great actors too alan rickman and sigourney weaver oh wow i'll check that out uh do you help your kids with their math homework sometimes uh yeah um i mean um so they actually uh often they're embarrassed to talk to me sometimes so we have a math tutor as well but yeah my son william um he's he's um 18 he's uh he's taking these machine learning classes and and so forth and he's he's applying for collisions and he's got a mass research project he bounces some ideas off me sometimes um and my daughter is uh is nine and so she's doing like long division and so forth and yes sometimes i um you know i mean i i can try to help turn a mass problem into into some sort of uh fun puzzle for her you know like like here's this pet bunny that she would hear doors so um you know like if you can turn a division problem into like you know you have to feed three bunnies using so many pellets or something like that so she can uh it's it's it's easier for her to to to uh she's not as afraid of of uh how fast if you present it in a in a very light-hearted way understandable uh and finally do you connect with people through social media um a little bit uh mostly through my blog um that's the one social media i do use i don't really use facebook twitter i mean i have accounts but i never basically uh log into them um yeah i like the blog because um you can write very detailed mathematics on there so it's mostly a work blog um yeah i don't really share personal stuff you know i don't show what i have for breakfast or something i don't do instagram um some some mathematicians do actually i mean i i mean so it's great that there are some mathematicians out there who are showing on social media that they're just normal people you know they do the same things that everyone else does you know they cook they climb they surf you know they and they have kids um yeah um but yeah i mostly just use social media for my professional work and what do you enjoy doing in your free time um well i have two kids i don't have that much free time um yeah um watch movies i don't know um i used to play a lot of computer games but i don't time for that anymore so i i want to play a little bit i've been teaching myself some languages um so this is app called duolingo um that i've used uh i told myself spanish and i'm currently teaching us of hebrew from it so can you speak a bit of spanish for us yeah yeah yeah you know yeah you're not helpless but you'll be in uh yeah it's not that great um i mostly didn't my actually my daughter is more fluent in spanish than i did because she was in a dual language program so i i learned spanish so that i could speak with her a little bit um also a housekeeper speak spanish um and in los angeles actually like half the science of spanish anyway so it's actually useful um and hebrew i have some friends who are israeli i wanted to surprise them i my i had a friend who had a 70th birthday um and we were videotaping a little birthday congratulations so i sent mine in hebrew oh that's so sweet yeah that's very sweet so uh that concludes our interview thank you so much for your time and great fun interacting with you yes okay again cheers all right thanks a lot thank you you

Channel: Young Scientists Journal

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Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020