<p>Today, Professor Terence Tao was awarded the Fields Medal (the Nobel Prize of Mathematics) for his research in "partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory". This medal is awarded once every four years; the 2006 winners belong to Princeton, UC Berkeley, University of Paris, and for the first time ever, UCLA. From the looks of it, the mathematics department is going utterly insane right now.</p>
<p>Professor Tao was my Math 33A professor in Winter 2005, and one of the more amicable lecturers during my time here. Some of the Mathematics Honors students actually stuck around after lecture to discuss working under him, instead of merely homework and upcoming midterms... I am honored to have conversed face-to-face with this extraordinary gentleman. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Jesus Christ this guy is a frigging genius!!..........He's up there with John Nash, Descartes, Riemann. Wow a PhD at the age of 20 at Princeton Unversity, that's insane. I would love to meet this guy.</p>
<p>I watched the video, he said something about it being sunnier here than Princeton... maybe it's not MIT we have to be worried about, but Caltech instead :p</p>
<p>here's something funny..on the math department homepage:</p>
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UCLA Mathematics Emeritus Professor Lennart Carleson has been awarded the Abel Prize by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. This award is named for the brilliant 19th century mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, and is widely considered to be the "Nobel Prize of Mathematics".
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<p>so which one is the nobel? Abel Prize or Fields Medal? hahaha</p>
<p>The Fields Medal is the prize more likely to be the "Nobel Prize of Mathematics" because it's much more prestigious; the Abel Prize is awarded annually by the Norwegian government, whereas the Fields Medal is awarded once every four years by the International Congress of Mathematicians, an exclusive academic organization akin to the Nobel Foundation. :rolleyes:</p>
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The reclusive Grigory "Grisha" Perelman turned down a Fields medal, considered by many to be the Nobel prize of maths. In 2002 the Russian claimed to have solved the Poincaré conjecture, a problem which has stumped the best minds for a century. The other three Fields medals were awarded to Andrei Okounkov at Princeton University, Terence Tao at the University of California, and Wendelin Werner at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay.
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<p>stupid Guardian article doesn't mention Los Angeles</p>
<p>Also for the record, Citan's list didn't mention that Grigori Perelman (the one who actually declined the Fields Medal) was a faculty member at UCB before he became a recluse. :rolleyes:</p>
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Like the summer Olympics and the World Cup, the Fields Medal is awarded every fourth year. Along with Tao, the Fields Medal also was presented to Andrei Okounkov, professor of mathematics at Princeton University; Grigori Perelman, formerly a Miller Fellow at University of California, Berkeley; and Wendelin Werner, professor of mathematics at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay.
<p>Well, one person doesn't represent the whole dept. Some people put too much emphasis on rare awards like that. The fact that so few people are awarded means any university will be lucky to just have one winner. Hence the presence of any of those individuals may be more a reflection of luck rather than the relative strength of the program. Of course, UCLA's program must be decent otherwise a guy like him wouldn't be there at the first place. Other than that, it doesn't mean it's better than other strong departments that don't have any winner (like UCB). Didn't one of Tao's collegues say something like "UCLA is lucky to have him" or "we are lucky to have him"?</p>
<p>At this point however, undergraduates won't get a chance with him, unless they're one of the Mathematics majors with departmental honors now scrambling for a piece of his wisdom. Even if you could enroll into his lecture, it would fill up instantaneously on the first pass. In retrospective, I am grateful to have been enrolled in the only lower-division class he's ever taught. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>actually he is teaching Fourier Analysis (MATH 247A) this fall and only 14/40 seats have been filled....we just don't appreciate mathematicians :rolleyes:</p>