Terence Tao

And in mathematics, there's definitely both hedgehogs and foxes.

And then there's people who can play both roles.

And I think ideal collaboration between mathematicians involves... You need some diversity.

A fox working with many hedgehogs or vice versa.

But I identify mostly as a fox, certainly.

I like...

arbitrage somehow, like learning how one field works, learning the tricks of that wheel, and then going to another field, which people don't think is related, but I can adapt the tricks.

So see the connections between the fields.

Yeah.

So there are other mathematicians who are far deeper than I am.

They're really hedgehogs.

They know everything about one field, and they're much faster and more effective in that field, but I can give them these extra tools.

know searching for the connections versus like very singular focus i'm much more comfortable with with the the the fox paradigm yeah so um yeah i i like looking for analogies narratives um i i spend a lot of time if there's a result i see it in one field and i like the result it's a cool result but i don't like the proof like it uses

types of mathematics that I'm not super familiar with.

I often try to re-prove it myself using the tools that I favor.

Often my proof is worse, but by the exercise of doing so, I can say, oh, now I can see what the other proof was trying to do.

And from that, I can get some understanding of the tools that are used in that field.

So it's very exploratory, doing crazy things in crazy fields and reinventing the wheel a lot.

Whereas the hedgehog style is much more scholarly.

You're very knowledge-based.