One of the world’s leading mathematicians, Flinders University alumnus Terry Tao, will return to Adelaide to give a public lecture in September.
The research professor in math at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1999, will speak on one of his areas of expertise, Large and Small Gaps in the Primes, at Adelaide Town Hall on 28 September.
The presentation, looking at “many questions about the gaps between consecutive prime numbers which are not completely solved after decades of effort”, will mark the start of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, hosted by Flinders University, from 28 September to 1 October.
Other keynote speakers include other professors from the University of California, Princeton and New York Universities, Oxford University, Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, EPFL Switzerland, and Melbourne, Newcastle and Flinders universities in Australia.
The “singular mind” of the Adelaide schoolboy who attended Flinders University, now aged 40, was profiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gareth Cook in The New York Times last week.
It recounts how child and teenage prodigy Terence was so advanced, he started studying at Flinders University from the age of 9 and went on to finish a master’s thesis (‘‘Convolution Operators Generated by Right-Monogenic and Harmonic Kernels’’) by age 17.
He then moved to America and completed a PhD under Professor Elias Stein at Princeton University in 1996 and currently sits in the James and Carol Collins Chair of Mathematics at UCLA.
Professor Tao’s areas of research include harmonic analysis, combinatorics, PDE and number theory and has won a number of awards since 2000 including the Salem Prize, Bocher Prize, Fields Medal, Crafoord Prize and the MacArthur fellowship.
The Fellow of the Royal Society and the Australian Academy of Sciences regularly shares some of his genius in a well-followed blog
