1. Terence Tao
The number one on our list of best mathematicians in the world today is born in 1975 in a well-educated family where his father was a pediatrician and his mother math and physics teacher, Terence and his two brothers all became big names in their areas.
Terence showed that he is talented for the mathematics in early age, and at the age of 9 he was already at the university level and scored 760 on the SAT at the John Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent. At the age of 10, he won all three medals on the International Mathematical Olympiad.
At the age of 15, he wrote his first assistant paper and one year later got both Bachelors and Master’s degree from Flinders University. By the time he was 21, he had a Ph.D. from the Princeton University and started at UCLA, where he was later promoted to be a full-time professor.
He is famous for his Green-Tao theorem with his colleague Ben Green in 2004 about the arithmetic progression of every prime number. Then Tao’s inequality, Kakeya conjecture, and Horn conjecture. He published over 300 papers and 17 math books.
His first award was Salem prize in 2000, then, two years later he won the Bocher Memorial Prize. In 2003, he was awarded a Clay Research Medal, and in 2005 he got four awards and five in 2006. Among those five is the highest award for a mathematician, the Fields Medal. From 2010 to 2015 he received nine more awards for his work.
For all of his work, he definitely deserved the first place on our list of 10 best mathematicians in the world today.
