Terence Tao

Yeah, I think different athleticians have different levels of emotional investment in what they do.

I mean, I think for some people it's just a job.

You know, you have a problem and if it doesn't work out, you go on the next one.

Yeah, so the fact that you can always move on to another problem, it reduces the emotional connection.

I mean, there are cases, you know, so there are certain problems that are what are called mathematical diseases where we just latch on to that one problem and they spend years and years

thinking about nothing but that one problem.

And, um, you know, maybe the, the career suffers and so forth.

But how could this big win, this will, you know, once I, once I finish this problem, I will, I will make up for all the years of, of, of lost opportunity.

And that's, that's, I mean, occasionally, occasionally it works, but I, um, I really don't recommend it for people without the right fortitude.

Yeah.

So I, I've never been super invested in any one problem.

Um,

One thing that helps is that we don't need to call our problems in advance.

Well, when we do crowd proposals, we sort of say, we will study this set of problems.

But even then, we don't promise, definitely by five years, I will supply a proof of all these things.

You promise to make some progress or discover some interesting phenomena.

And maybe you don't solve the problem, but you find some related problem that you can say something new about.

And that's a much more feasible task.

Again.

So, I mean, the problem is like a Riemann hypothesis.