Terence Tao Quotes

For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.

When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed.

Mathematics is as old as Man.

There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary to be a mathematician.

I was a mathematics major and really into math.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get 'Calculus for the Practical Man.' By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.

I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

In mathematics we find the primitive source of rationality; and to mathematics must the biologists resort for means to carry out their researches.

What interests me is the connection between maths and the real world.

I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.

Early in my career, I wanted to be a mathematician.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world

I'm a mathematician and always have been, as far as I can remember. I don't remember when I first got involved with mathematics, but I think of myself always as a mathematician first.

Fractions, decimals, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, mechanics - these are the steps up the mountain side. How high is one going to get? For me, the pinnacle was Projective Geometry. Who today has even heard of this branch of mathematics?

I love that once you know the basic rules of maths, you can do whatever you want with it.

You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math.

It's strange how few of the world's great problems are solved by people who remember their algebra.

I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.

What science can there be more noble, more excellent, more useful for men, more admirably high and demonstrative, than this of mathematics?