Terence Tao

And often these models are incorrect, and this causes all kinds of problems.

But

So, yeah, so to humanize a subject, you know, if you identify a small number of people and say, you know, these are representative people of a subject, role models, for example, that has some role, but it can also be, yeah, too much of it can be harmful because it's,

I'll be the first to say that my own career path is not that of a typical mathematician.

I had a very accelerated education.

I skipped a lot of classes.

I think I always had very fortunate mentoring opportunities, and I think I was at the right place at the right time.

Just because someone doesn't have my knowledge

trajectory, it doesn't mean that they can't be good mathematicians.

They can be good mathematicians in a very different style, and we need people of a different style.

Sometimes too much focus is given on the person who took the last step to complete

a project in mathematics or elsewhere that's really taken centuries or decades with lots and lots of previous work.

But that's a story that's difficult to tell if you're not an expert, because it's easier to just say one person did this one thing.

It makes for a much simpler history.

Yeah, so I was a graduate student at the time.

I vaguely remember there was press attention and everything.

Um, we all had the same, um, uh, we had pigeon holes in the same mail room, you know, so we all particular mail and like suddenly Andrew Wiles's mailbox exploded to be overflowing.

That's a good, that's a good metric.

Yeah.

You know, so yeah, we all talked about it at tea and so forth.