Terence Tao

Terence Tao is an Australian-American mathematician known for an unusually broad range of major contributions spanning partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, combinatorics and analytic number theory. In 2004, working with British mathematician Ben Green, Tao proved what is now called the Green-Tao theorem, a striking result in number theory showing that the sequence of prime numbers, despite becoming ever more sparse as numbers grow larger, nonetheless contains arithmetic progressions of primes of any chosen finite length, meaning sequences of primes evenly spaced apart by some constant gap, no matter how long a progression one specifies in advance. The proof combined tools from several different areas of mathematics that had not previously been connected in this way, and it became one of the most celebrated results in number theory of the early twenty-first century. Tao was awarded the Fields Medal in 2006 for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory, and he has gone on to receive numerous further honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, while continuing an unusually prolific research career as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.