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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Science Show · How bird brains help us understand human brains, and how eugenics had as much hand in the birth control movement as did feminism · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

always playing with mathematics.

A bit later on, I participated in mass competitions where I went abroad and represented my country for a few of these.

And you got the first gold, I remember.

Well, I think I was the youngest to win it at the time.

I still am, actually.

Still the youngest?

By about six months or something.

There was a Peruvian boy who also got it recently.

So I have studied equations that were motivated by physics, but I studied the pure aspects of them.

I did do one work which had practical impact because I collaborated with a statistician and engineer who were interested in trying to speed up certain measurement acquisition techniques, like in magnetic resonance imaging.

and to try to get a good MRI scan using fewer measurements.

And they managed to convert it into a pure maths problem, which I could then work with, and we managed to solve the problem.

And so we now have developed this technique called compressed sensing, where we wanted the people to develop it.

And MRI scans now, in some cases, we can speed them up by a factor of up to 10.

A scan that would take three minutes may take 30 seconds.

Right, yeah, so this is the great role that mathematics plays in the sciences, that it's so abstract that there are ideas which may originate in one discipline, but mathematics can abstract the key features of it, which can then be used in other disciplines.

So, for example, this technique that we use to speed up MRI scans actually originated in seismology.

People wanted to detect faults in the ground using very limited measurements, and they had developed a technique

to do that empirically, but they had no mathematical explanation of why it worked and what else it was good for.

But we managed to analyze it mathematically and we saw that it wasn't just restricted to seismology.

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