Terence Tao

So I ended up closing my eyes, being on the floor, and just imagining myself to actually be

this vector field, and rolling around to try to see how to change coordinates in such a way that somehow things in all directions would behave in a reasonably linear fashion.

And, yeah, my aunt walked in on me while I was doing that, and she was asking, what am I doing doing this?

It's complicated, is the answer.

Yeah, yeah, and she said, okay, fine, you're a young man, I don't ask questions.

A lot of pen and paper.

One thing you pick up as a mathematician is sort of, I call it cheating strategically.

So the beauty of mathematics is that you get to change the rule, change the problem, change the rules as you wish.

You don't get to do this for any other field.

Like, you know, if you're an engineer and someone says, build a bridge over this river, you can't say, I want to build this bridge over here instead, or I want to build it out of paper instead of steel.

But in mathematician, you can do whatever you want.

It's like trying to solve a computer game where you can, there's unlimited cheat codes available.

And so, you know, you can set this, there's a dimension that's large, I'll set it to one.

I'd solve the one dimension problem first, or whatever.

There's a main term and an error term.

I'm going to make a spherical cow assumption.

I'll assume the error term is zero.

And so the way you should solve these problems is not in sort of this Iron Man mode where you make things maximally difficult.

But actually, the way you should approach any reasonable math problem is that if there are 10 things that are making your life difficult,

Find a version of the problem that turns off nine of the difficulties but only keeps one of them.