2000
Tao found a gauge transformation for the wave maps equation while visiting his aunt in Australia around 2000.
“I found this transformation while visiting my aunt in Australia, and I was trying to understand the dynamics of all these theories.”
Topic
Terence Tao
10 facts from 1 episode, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2016
Terence Tao published a paper on finite-time blowup for an averaged three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation in 2016.
“In 2016, you published a paper finite time blow up for an averaged three dimensional Navier Stokes equation.”
Undated
Terence Tao thanked his wife, who trained as an electrical engineer, for the circuit-style thinking behind his averaged Navier-Stokes construction.
“So I I actually thanked my wife for this because she was trained as a electrical engineer.”
Undated
Tao says the standard dark matter model has about fourteen parameters yet fits petabytes of astronomical observations.
“the dark matter model, I think it has like fourteen parameters, and it explains petabytes of data.”
Undated
As a Princeton graduate student, Tao attended a talk by John Conway on 'extreme proofs', which treated the space of proofs as having optimal extremes.
“I remember one of the very first research talks I I went to was a talk by Conway on what he called extreme proof.”
Undated
Tao estimates formalizing a proof in Lean takes about ten times as much effort as writing it on paper.
“I estimate that the effort time and effort taken to formalize a proof is about ten times the amount taken to to write it out.”
Undated
Formalizing one theorem with the constant 12 took about three weeks and around twenty people, after which updating it to 11 took only a day or two.
“So that took like three weeks to formalize, uh, and and like twenty people to formalize this, this, this original proof.”
Undated
The Green–Tao theorem states that the prime numbers contain arithmetic progressions of any length.
“it's a statement that the primes contain arithmetic progressions of any length.”
Undated
In Tao's Equational Theories Project, all but two of about 22 million implication questions about algebraic laws had been settled at the time of the interview.
“Um, so of these 22 million, all but two have been settled.”
Undated
Tao proved that, statistically, almost all starting values in the Collatz process drift down to much smaller values.
“that statistically, like, 99% of all inputs would would drift down to, no, maybe not all the way to one, but to be much, much smaller than what you started.”
Episodes