Terence Tao, mathematician: ‘It’s not good for something as important as AI to be a monopoly held by one or two companies’
Terence Tao snorts and waves his hands dismissively when he hears that he is the most intelligent human being on the planet, according to a number of online rankings, including a recent one conducted by the BBC. He is, however, indisputably one of the best mathematicians in history. When he was two, his parents saw him teaching another five-year-old boy to count.
“That’s what my parents told me. I don’t remember this myself. They asked me who I had learned it from. I said, from Sesame Street,” says Tao, 49, who was born in the Australian city of Adelaide. When he was 11, he won a bronze medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. At 12, he took home silver. At 13, gold. At 21, he received his doctorate from Princeton University. At 24, he was already a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. And at 31, he won the Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize in his discipline.
“He’s the Leonardo da Vinci of mathematics,” said his Spanish colleague Eva Miranda, during a talk organized on September 18 by the Center for Mathematical Research in Barcelona. “It is no exaggeration to say that he is the greatest living mathematician. What makes him special is that he is the most versatile,” explains Miranda.
