"He is arguably the world's best mathematician," says Joseph Rudnick, the dean of Physical Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Tao, now 39, has been a mathematics professor since he was 24. Problem solver: Mathematics maestro Terry Tao. He got his masters when he was 17 and his PhD at Princeton University at 20. By the time he was 16, he'd finished his science degree. When he was nine, Tao commenced part-time studies in mathematics at Flinders University. "Terry hears mathematics and sees and smells mathematics in a way we don't." "Off the scale," says Miraca Gross, an authority on the education of gifted children, describing his IQ. Academics studied it with astonishment throughout his Adelaide childhood as he charged through IQ tests and International Mathematical Olympiads with unprecedented results. Yet this is a man with an intimidatingly rare and precious mind.
It's hard to be intimidated by a man playing with a toy pony.
Terence Tao - Terry, as he's mostly known - is sitting on a leather sofa in his Los Angeles living room, thin, bare-footed and bespectacled, talking to his three-year-old daughter, Madeleine, just home from a birthday party. He presses a plastic stethoscope into the soft toy's body, feigns a pony cough. One of the world's greatest minds is playing with a toy pony.
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