Terence Tao

If there's something which I read about, which I feel like I should understand, I have the capability to understand this, but I don't understand why it works.

There's some magic in it that, you know, so someone was able to use a type of mathematics I'm not familiar with and get a result which I would like to prove, and I can't do it by myself, but they could do it by their method.

Then I wanted to find out what was their trick.

It bugs me that someone else can do something which I think I can do, but I can't.

So I've always had that kind of,

obsessive completionist type streak.

I've had to wean myself off computer games because I start a game, I want to play it to completion, so both the levels.

So that's one way in which I learn new fields.

I collaborate with a lot of people who have taught me other types of mathematics.

I just make friends with another mathematician who's working on another area of mathematics, and I find their problems interesting, but they have to teach me some of the basic tricks and what's known, what's not known, and I learn a lot from that.

I found that writing about what I've learned, I have a blog where I sometimes record things that I've learned.

Because in the past, when I was younger, I would learn something and do this cool trick and say, okay, I'm going to remember this.

And then six months later, I'd forgotten.

I remember remembering it, but I can't reconstruct my arguments.

And the first few times it was so frustrating to have understood something and then lost it.

So I resolved I should always write down

anything cool that I've learned.

And this is part of how this blog came about.

How long does it take you to write a blog post?

It's something I often do when I don't want to do other work.