First Australian Fields Medallist Announced. (August 22, 2006)

        Professor Terence Tao (31) was today awarded one of four Fields Medals at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) which meets once every four years. The meeting this year is in Madrid. Professor Tao is the first Australian to receive the award, the most prestigious in mathematics.

Terry Tao, 2006 Fields Medallist

A maximum of four Fields Medals may be awarded at each ICM and is given  to candidates no older than 40 on January 1 of the year of the award.

It is given in recognition of exceptional achievement and is generally awarded for a body of work rather than for a single, isolated research result, thereby differing significantly from the scientific Nobel Prizes to which it is often compared.

Professor Tao, born in Adelaide, South Australia, received his undergraduate training and Masters degree at Flinders University before earning his PhD at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA in 1996.

Almost immediately he was invited to join the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he was made full professor at twenty-four.

Professor Tao was presented with his medal by Spain's King Juan Carlos I at the Congress's opening ceremony.

The Citation reads:

For his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory

Professor Tao is considered by his peers to be a supreme problem-solver whose spectacular work has had an impact across several mathematical areas. He combines sheer technical power, an other-worldly ingenuity for hitting upon new ideas, and a startlingly natural point of view that leaves other mathematicians wondering, "Why didn't anyone see that before?".

The other three 2006 Fields Medallists are:

Andrei Okounkov: "for his contributions bridging probability, representation theory and algebraic geometry"

Grigori Perelman: "for his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow"

Wendelin Werner: “for his contributions to the development of stochastic Loewner evolution, the geometry of two-dimensional Brownian motion, and conformal field theory"