Among current mathematicians, many people regard Professor Tao as the world's finest... Opinions on such things vary, of course. Professor Tao kindly fielded some of our questions, including...
========== So what did you eat for breakfast-jam sandwich, yeahYou had a sandwich?
Yeah
A jam sandwich?
Yeahyeah I always loved mathematics as a kid, soone of my earliest memories is when I was liketwo years old and my grandma wascleaning the windows in our home,and I was insisting that she putnumbers on the- she put the detergent onwindows in the form of numbers so I alwaysliked numbers and patterns and logicand so forth, things are veryblack-and-white where there's one rightanswer and everything else is wrong. I didn'tlike so subjective shades of grey typequestions, I would work on math workbooksfor fun you know my parents wanted toshut me up she just give me a workbookand I'll just go do sums and so forth so Ialways liked mathematics, mathcompetitions-...
