Terence Tao

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.

You stay up to speed on all the developments in this field.

You know all the history.

You have a very good understanding of exactly the strengths and weaknesses of each particular technique.

So yeah, I think you'd rely a lot more on sort of calculation than sort of trying to find narratives.

So yeah, I mean, I can do that too, but there are other people who are extremely good at that.

Let's step back and...

That's a good question.