How Terry Tao Became an Evangelist for AI in Math

T erry Tao has never been afraid of unconventional ideas. In November 2014, he was on a panel of five distinguished mathematicians, all inaugural recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, which came with a $3 million award. The laureates’ conversation ranged from whether mathematics is invented or discovered — most of the mathematicians agreed that, at the very least, it feels like an act of discovery — to an assessment of the odds that we’re living in a digital simulation. “Yeah, I think we’re actually not real,” said Maxim Kontsevich, who did his most important work in the 1990s at the intersection of math and physics.

Yet over the course of the 40-minute discussion, the statements that drew the most incredulity were Tao’s. He predicted that in the future, instead of working alone or in small teams of two or three, mathematicians might work on projects with hundreds of other people at a time. And when these collaborations were over, he said — in his modest, understated way — the results might be checked not by human referees but by computers. “One day we may actually write our papers not in LaTeX, but in some language which some smart software will convert to a formal language, and every so often you’ll get a compilation error — the computer does not understand how you derived this step,” he said.

The statement was greeted by the event moderator and the other laureates as preposterous enough to make the simulation hypothesis seem reasonable by comparison. Even more surprising than the idea of hundreds of mathematicians working together was the fact that such a collaboration would appeal to Tao — because if anyone in the world seemed well suited to going it alone, it was him.

Tao was born in 1975 in Adelaide, Australia, three years after his parents immigrated to the country from Hong Kong. The first signs that their firstborn son was different came early. When Tao was 2 and his family was visiting friends, his parents found him gathered with several 6-year-olds, demonstrating how to count using wooden blocks. Asked how he’d learned to count things, he responded that he had seen it on Sesame Street . Five years later, when Tao was 7, he began learning calculus.

For three weeks in the spring of 1985, Tao’s parents brought him to the United States, where he met with Julian Stanley, director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, then at Johns Hopkins University. Stanley described Tao as having the greatest mathematical ability he had ever seen. That same year Tao met the acclaimed mathematician Paul Erdős during the latter’s visit to Adelaide. A famous picture shows the grandfatherly Erdős, 72 at the time, reading a document in his lap while Tao, 10 years old with thick black hair, looks on intently, fingers raised thoughtfully to his chin.

Tao’s young legend grew when he entered the International Math Olympiad in 1986. He won a bronze medal that first year, becoming, at the age of 10, the youngest competitor ever to achieve that result. In the two succeeding years he became the youngest-ever silver medalist and finally the youngest person ever to win a gold medal. His formal education proceeded at a similarly accelerated pace. He graduated from the local Flinders University in Adelaide when he was 15 and, in the fall of 1992, boarded a plane with his father for New Jersey, where he started a Ph.D. in math at Princeton University. Erdős had endorsed Tao’s early admission to the program, writing in a letter of recommendation, “I am sure he will develop into a first-rate mathematician and perhaps into a really great one.”

Erdős was right. By the time Tao was 24, he had made enough new discoveries to have his choice of permanent faculty positions; he ultimately decided to settle at the University of California, Los Angeles. Around that time, he met a young English number theorist named Ben Green. The two began collaborating on a proof that certain kinds of patterns called arithmetic progressions — in which the numbers in a set increase by a fixed interval, like 7, 10, 13, 16 — inevitably appear in large collections of prime numbers, despite the fact that primes appear to be scattered randomly along the number line. Their proof would become the signature result of Tao’s early career, contributing to his winning the Fields Medal in 2006, and propelling him to the upper echelons of mathematics.

T ao could have built a successful career without collaborating with anyone, but that’s not the way he liked to work. He viewed working with other researchers as a primary way to discover new ideas — take what you know, pair it with what I know, and see what happens.

This approach led Tao’s mathematical research to range over an unusually broad set of topics, from analytic number theory, including the Green-Tao theorem about prime numbers, to analysis, where he studied properties of the Navier-Stokes equations that describe the behavior of fluids, to algorithms for constructing MRI images from d…