Terence Tao

So it does keep us honest.

I mean, it's not a perfect panacea, but I think we do have more of a culture of admitting error because we're forced to all the time.

Big, ridiculous question.

So first of all, as I mentioned before, there's some time dependence.

On the day.

Yeah, if you plot cumulatively over time, for example, Euclid is one of the contenders.

And then maybe some unnamed anonymous mathematicians before that.

Whoever came up with the concept of numbers.

Yeah, Hilbert spaces.

We have lots of things that are named after him, of course.

Just the arrangement of mathematics and just the introduction of certain concepts.

I mean, 23 problems have been extremely influential.

Yeah, I mean, there's this bystander effect everywhere.

If no one says you should do X, everyone just mills around waiting for somebody else to do something, and nothing gets done.

One thing that actually you have to teach undergraduates in mathematics is that you should always try something.

So you see...

a lot of paralysis in an undergraduate trying a math problem.

If they recognize that there's a certain technique that can be applied, they will try it.

But there are problems for which they see none of their standard techniques obviously applies.

And the common reaction is then just paralysis.