12/13/2023 0 Comments Terence tao bornIt was as unexpected as a violinist suddenly winning a major piano competition. Cappell, a professor at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, calls him "the leading analyst of his generation." Yet the Green-Tao theorem resolved a major question in number theory, a completely separate field. Tao's specialty is analysis, the area of math that includes calculus and differential equations. Green and Tao's discovery was the mathematical sensation of 2004. Somewhere there's a prime number constellation with the same shape as Nash's umbrella. Tao, together with Cambridge University mathematician Ben Green, proved that this canvas contains patterns of every conceivable shape. But it is more illuminating to think of them as stars in the sky, scattered more or less at random over a vast canvas. Prime numbers, those that can be divided only by themselves and 1 (that is, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on), can be visualized as points on a line. UCLA mathematician Terence Tao, 32, relates to that scene, perhaps because it reminds him of his own wife, Laura, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but certainly because it illustrates one of his most famous theorems. He does it, and she is utterly charmed, saying, "Do it again." There's a scene in the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind in which Russell Crowe as mathematician John Nash asks his beautiful wife-to-be to gaze into the evening sky and name any shape-an umbrella, for instance-and then says he will find the shape in a constellation.
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