Australian Born Fields Medallist, Terence Tao, Makes a Point Regarding the "Selling" of Maths and Science in Australia. (January 20, 2007)

    Terry Tao (31) has been appointed as the first professor to UCLA's James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Science following the Collins' gift to the College of US$1 million to endow the chair.

Among other honours that have been awarded to this extraordinary Adelaide born mathematician Professor Tao was named a MacArthur Fellow in September 2006. In presenting the award, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation said: "Terence Tao is a mathematician who has developed profound insights into a host of difficult areas, including partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, combinatorics, and number theory. His work is characterized by breadth and depth, technical brilliance and profound insight, placing him as one of the outstanding mathematicians of his time."

And in naming Tao one of "The Brilliant 10" scientists, Popular Science magazine, in their October 2006 issue, called him "Math's Great Uniter" and said that "to Tao, the traditional boundaries between different mathematical fields don't seem to exist." The magazine described as "quintessential Tao" a breakthrough in a new field that "requires a mastery of techniques from across the mathematical spectrum. It's this kind of ingenuity that won Tao this year's Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize equivalent in mathematics. He's the youngest person to receive the Fields since 1986."

The Australian's Justine Ferrari now reports Terry Tao said yesterday [Australian] students were mostly unaware of "how useful and powerful mathematics is in the modern world", and that part of the problem with the study of maths in Australia was the "lukewarm and fluctuating level of support ... both financial and rhetorical, from the community and particularly the state and federal governments".

As an example of the impact of maths on our everyday lives he cited the example of web search engine Google, which was founded by two mathematicians, as an example of the diversity in which mathematics was used.

Professor Tao told Ms Ferrari "Mathematics underlies everything from banking and internet security to finance, to tracking and controlling disease, to efficient communications, to web search. It might help to popularise these modern applications more, so that students see that mathematics is more than just drills and computation and manipulation of formulae."