seed magazine (a science/techie mag) has an article on one of this year's fields medalists, and for once it's not grigori perelman. instead, they chose to highlight terence tao of ucla.
the really weird thing is that i've actually met terence tao, but at the time i didn't know who he was:
it was a little more than four years ago, i had just finished my undergrad and as luck would have it, the park city mathematics institute had flexible funding and accepted my application into their three-week summer program in park city, utah.
i arrived there in the afternoon and when wandering the hallways of the conference center, i bumped into two mathematicians hard at work with a pile of pages with scribbles in front of them. one of them, a young asian man, seemed to be explaining something to the other, a young woman.
"hard at work already, eh?" i joked. to my infinite future relief, i didn't say what i thought i saw: two grad students already prepping for the lectures by distinguished faculty.
"um, yes," the young man replied, and the two returned to work.
the next day, i found out that the young man was terry tao and the young woman his student. how did i find out?
by attending tao's lectures. brilliant man.
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