The Singular Mind of Terry Tao - The New York Times - 0 views
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his view of mathematics has utterly changed since childhood.
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But it turned out that the work of real mathematicians bears little resemblance to the manipulations and memorization of the math student.
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he ancient art of mathematics, Tao has discovered, does not reward speed so much as patience, cunning and, perhaps most surprising of all, the sort of gift for collaboration and improvisation that characterizes the best jazz musicians.
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n class, he conveys a sense that mathematics is fun.
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at 8 years old, Tao scored a 760 on the math portion of the SAT — but Stanley urged the couple to keep taking things slow and give their son’s emotional and social skills time to develop.
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Tao became notorious for his nights haunting the graduate computer room to play the historical-simulation game Civilization. (He now avoids computer games, he told me, because of what he calls a ‘‘completist streak’’ that makes it hard to stop playing.) At a local comic-book store, Tao met a circle of friends who played ‘‘Magic: The Gathering,’’ the intricate fantasy card game. This was Tao’s first real experience hanging out with people his age, but there was also an element, he admitted, of escaping the pressures of Princeton
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Gifted children often avoid challenges at which they might not excel.
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At Princeton, crisis came in the form of the ‘‘generals,’’ a wide-ranging, arduous oral examination administered by three professors. While other students spent months working through problem sets and giving one another mock exams, Tao settled on his usual test-prep strategy: last-minute cramming. ‘‘I went in and very quickly got out of my depth,’’ he said. ‘‘They were asking questions which I had no ability to answer.’’
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The true work of the mathematician is not experienced until the later parts of graduate school, when the student is challenged to create knowledge in the form of a novel proof.
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As a group, the people drawn to mathematics tend to value certainty and logic and a neatness of outcome, so this game becomes a special kind of torture. And yet this is what any would-be mathematician must summon the courage to face down: weeks, months, years on a problem that may or may not even be possible to unlock.
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Ask mathematicians about their experience of the craft, and most will talk about an intense feeling of intellectual camaraderie. ‘‘A very central part of any mathematician’s life is this sense of connection to other minds, alive today and going back to Pythagoras,’
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‘Terry is what a great 21st-century mathematician looks like,’’ Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has collaborated with Tao, told me. He is ‘‘part of a network, always communicating, always connecting what he is doing with what other people are doing.’’
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Early encounters with math can be misleading. The subject seems to be about learning rules — how and when to apply ancient tricks to arrive at an answer. Four cookies remain in the cookie jar; the ball moves at 12.5 feet per second. Really, though, to be a mathematician is to experiment. Mathematical research is a fundamentally creative act.
