Terence Tao
speaker
3,298 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 26 Jun
Terence Tao’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Well, as long as I can remember, I liked numbers and logic puzzles and anything with a definite objective answer.
One of my earliest memories was seeing my grandmother washing windows.
I think I was three or something, and I demanded that she put the detergent on the windows in the shape of numbers.
So I always liked numbers.
When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quiet me down.
Right, so there's often one right answer, but what is often not taught in classes is that there's many ways to get that answer.
And kids often have natural intuition and creativity about numbers.
I have a daughter who's six, and she has homework where she has to add two numbers, and she does it in creative ways.
If she has to add 16 to something, she adds 20 and takes off four and does a bit roundabout, but it's sort of her own creative way.
Now, unfortunately, what happens sometimes is that math teachers, maybe they're not so well trained in mathematics.
They've only learned to teach one particular way to do something.
And if a student is being creative and found a different way to do a problem, which isn't the way that's in the textbook, they may get point-stocked off or get told off and the student get discouraged.
Yeah, so you have to play with it.
You have to tinker with it in order to really make it your own.
And fortunately, in the classroom environment, sometimes that doesn't happen.
Yeah, so I played with maths a lot outside of the school environment.
I devoured maths books.
During the weekends, there was a retired maths professor who I had tea and scones with, and he would tell me about how he used maths in the war, and he had a little maths journal where he would do these recreational maths puzzles.
There was all these fancy combinatorial counting problems that he would recast in terms of stories about the Knights of the Round Table.
I also
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