Terence Tao

Born in Adelaide in 1975, Australian former child prodigy Terence Tao didn t waste any time flexing his educational muscles. When he was two years old, he was able to perform simple arithmetic. By the time he was nine, he was studying college level math courses. And in 1988, aged just 13, he became the youngest gold medal recipient in International Mathematical Olympiad history a record that still stands today. In 1992 Tao achieved a master s degree in mathematics from Flinders University in Adelaide, the institution from which he d attained his B.Sc. the year before. Then in 1996, aged 20, he earned a Ph.D. from Princeton, turning in a thesis entitled Three Regularity Results in Harmonic Analysis. Tao s long list of awards includes a 2006 Fields Medal, and he is currently a mathematics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.