In another era of mathematics, which is to say, in April, I visited Tao at his office in the Mathematical Sciences Building at U.C.L.A. The building was connected through a mazelike series of corridors and stairs to Boelter Hall, where, in 1969, the first message was sent on ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. One of the hallways had a telephone booth. Tao’s office was spacious and mostly unadorned, with beige carpeting and a beige sofa, six blackboards mounted onto two long walls, and stacks and shelves with hundreds of books bearing titles such as “Advances in Analysis: The Legacy of Elias M. Stein,” “Number Theory Volume I: Tools and Diophantine Equations,” and “The Arithmetic of Elliptic Curves.” Near the light switch, there was a drawing of a toothy monster in a black suit and tie, next to a message in code (“LWKIRLCS,” part of it read) written on a sheet of paper. His oldest child had made it for him years ago. “I don’t think I remember how to decode it,” Tao said. None of his many prizes and honors were on display, but there was a wall hanging—made by the Mathematics Genealogy Project, of North Dakota State University—recording generations upon generations of who had studied under whom.
Tao is slim, wears his dark hair boyishly grown out, and has a gentle and calm demeanor. He is fifty-one but looks a decade younger. He rides a bike to work, and he has several tennis racquets in the corner of his office, though he said that he hasn’t really had time to play tennis in years, owing to his proliferating duties. “If you want to profile a mathematician, I’m maybe not a good example,” he told me. “I get to do math on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And sometimes on airplanes.” He lives with his wife, Laura, their two children, four cats, a dog, and three rabbits. The family had intended to give the oldest rabbit, Spumpkin, away to a friend, because Spumpkin was “traumatized by the traffic” outside their house, Tao said. But that didn’t work out, so Spumpkin is still with them, which is O.K.; Spumpkin and the oldest cat are close friends.
Many mathematical geniuses have been as celebrated for their eccentricity as for their work. Erdős is only one of many examples. The eighteenth-century Italian mathematician Maria Agnesi, who wrote an early textbook on calculus, gave away most of her money and abandoned mathematics to devote herself fully to theology. The logician Kurt Gödel, whose incompleteness theorems revealed that no mathematical system could express every mathematical truth, came to believe that doctors had a secret book in which they wrote honestly about medications, that the I.R.S. was after him, and that his friend who had died decades before was still alive in the Soviet Union. John Nash (famous for contributions to game theory), Grigori Perelman (famous for solving the Poincaré conjecture), and Alexander Grothendieck (famous for developing a new foundation for algebraic geometry) all dramatically withdrew from their social spheres. Tao does not fit this tradition. He is very much of the world, which is somewhat surprising, considering that, when he was two years old, he was reportedly found typing out a favorite children’s story on his dad’s typewriter.
As a kid, Tao imagined that what professional mathematicians did was solve problems assigned to them, sort of like homework. By age sixteen, he was a graduate student in the mathematics department at Princeton University, and still somewhat in the dark about what he was meant to do with his mathematical imagination. He played a lot of video games, easily completed his coursework, and almost failed the qualifying exam for his doctorate. Not all child prodigies go on to brilliant careers. Tao, however, went on to become one of the most revered mathematicians alive today, praised for his profound contributions to an astonishing range of subjects, from the study of numbers to the analysis of waves—a polymath of math.
The election of Donald Trump for a second term, in 2024, made Tao even busier. Federal funding for U.C.L.A.’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where he serves as the director of special projects, was frozen, as were National Science Foundation grants that supported his department’s research, including his own. And, as the Trump Administration unrolled various anti-immigration orders, students and postdocs had visa troubles. Tao spent many months fund-raising among private donors to support the stipends and T.A. positions relied upon by his graduate students. Some of these donors were hedge funds and banks that had in the past offered him large sums to work for them. He had always declined, “but those connections were useful in that moment,” he said.
