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He is also the author of what I consider one of the most ironic blog posts of all time. In https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a-g

by btilly 5y ago

He is also the author of what I consider one of the most ironic blog posts of all time. In https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a-genius-to-do-maths/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t... he argues that you do not have to be a genius to do first rate mathematics. The irony is that this is being argued by person with the best documented genius in the history of mathematics. His official IQ of 230 remains the highest officially measured IQ in the world. He taught himself to read by age 2. He was taking Calculus at age 7. He remains the youngest person for any level of medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad. That doesn't quite convey it. The youngest person to earn a bronze in that competition was 10. Silver was 11. Gold was 12. All three records were set by Terrence Tao, who then didn't bother competing any more. See https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/Terence-Tao-Mozart-of-Math-7252 https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/Terence-Tao-Mozart-of-Mat... for some more of his accomplishments. His success is comparable to any person in the history of mathematics. Yes I am including Euler, Gauss, and Erdös. Euler possibly covered a bigger breadth of math. Gauss created more fields. Erdös solved more problems. And Tao has made more progress in more hard problems that had stumped everyone else.

dgs_sgd 5y ago
I personally hold him and Jon Von Neumann at a level above everyone else in modern mathematics
civilized 5y ago
I wonder if only geniuses can write "it doesn't take a genius" posts, because making truly hard things easier actually does take a genius.
- baetylus 5y ago
  That's part of the problem with "genius" - an emphasis on innate talent, excluding hard work or the degree to which the "genius" worked hard.
jhgb 5y ago
> He taught himself to read by age 2. Well, I taught myself to read by the age of 3... > He was taking Calculus at age 7. ...OK, clearly something went awry with me between the ages of 3 and 7.
- asddubs 5y ago
  i hit my personal rock bottom at age 5. i never recovered
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    I flunked kindergarten. (It hurt even at that age.)
    - glitchc 5y ago
      My oldest friend was held back in kindergarten. That’s how I met him.
      - charles_f 5y ago
        My kid is 3.5 and he still believes that 10 comes after 8. I'm deeply worried now.
        jacobolus 5y ago
        Einstein didn’t speak until age 4, so your kid is probably too precociously verbal to be the world’s most famous physicist.
        andi999 5y ago
        Probably he had to think it through which first words were appropriate.
        kierkegaard7 5y ago
        Well, he's not wrong...
ACow_Adonis 5y ago
What's the source for some of those claims? Calculus at seven I can believe, but teaching himself reading at 2 sounds like something that goes against what we know about biological and social development of the child. And official IQs of 230 and 300 sounds like someone doesn't understand what IQ is or the meaningfulness of measuring/quantifying such in a standardised way. Obviously the person may be exceptional, and I do not mean to take anything away from Terence in his work that i'm clearly unqualified to comment on (it wouldn't surprise me if a bit of digging shows him unconnected to such claims), but we shouldn't just accept such things as given. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >What's the source for some of those claims? Googling it, it seems like the claim that he taught himself to read when he was "a little over two" (ie not literally 24 months) has been repeated among multiple reputable news sources (New York Time, SMH, The Age). No comment on the IQ. >Calculus at seven I can believe, but teaching himself reading at 2 sounds like something that goes against what we know about biological and social development of the child. It doesn't seem too far-fetched, to be honest. Back when my wife worked in child-care, she knew this one kid who was speaking in multi-word sentences at 9 months old. Most kids don't reach this milestone until they're 2 1/2. Kids can and do surprise you.
- ip26 5y ago
  As a parent I’ve come to believe a lot of the stories about how so and so was playing golf or skiing or playing piano by 3 are very biased retrospectives. My kid was playing notes on harmonica at 18 months. Could he carry a tune? Of course not, but if one day he turned out to be a musical genius I could brag he has been playing instruments since he was an infant. See the careful embellishment? A kid who has memorized some sight words or some books can certainly claim “reading”, with just enough truth there for the tale to take hold when they do well later in life.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    To reinforce this: I remember feeling embarrassed by being described as a “natural” playing guitar. I also remember feeling humbled by my humility when I took guitar seriously and picked stuff up or figured out technique that astounded people.
chaboud 5y ago
Unless he was born on February 29th (good luck getting that drink at a bar), reading after only hitting two birthdays is the stuff of legend. That said, having been told so by a genius, I feel like I'm now unshackled, ready to pursue a life of mathematics as a non-genius.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  This is the correct takeaway! Go learn and explore!
- spoonjim 5y ago
  My son was reading at age 2. Was definitely not doing calculus at 7.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  > reading after only hitting two birthdays is the stuff of legend. I don't think this is quite true. I started reading shortly after my third birthday, and I don't think I just missed the cutoff for "legend". Though any one or two of Tao's other accomplishments fairly easily clear that bar, IMO.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Unless he was born on February 29th (good luck getting that drink at a bar), reading after only hitting two birthdays is the stuff of legend. No it isn't. I would have called it "normal".
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Re-read, or dial down.
- jamesdmiller 5y ago
  Children with hyperlexia can often learn to read before they are two. I personally knew a children who before the age of two was reading.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 5y ago
eyelidlessness 5y ago
Without even reading a single word of it, the non-irony is in your characterization. He taught himself. Ultimately we all taught ourselves and our peers and mentees. Intelligence is mostly rooted in curiosity and attention, not some innate capacity. People who are perceived to be at the lower end of that capacity often inform those who aren’t, and vice versa.
- leeoniya 5y ago
  > not some innate capacity i would wager a lot of money that no one here has the capacity to approach John von Neumann, Srinivasa Ramanujan or Terence Tao in a single lifetime of unlimited curiosity and attention.
paulpauper 5y ago
an iq of 230 probably does not exist . it is impossible to devise a test accurate enough measure such a high iq .More likely there are probably a hundred people in the world who can be considered the smartest, including Terrance Tao and other prodigies. And that German guy who recently got a Field's Medal. He said to do math, not first-rate math. I have witnessed plenty of seemingly merely above-average-IQ people make interesting, novel contributions to math. Complex analysis, infinite series, matrices, stuff like that.They don't get much media coverage but produce interesting results and produce high quality math..that is probably what he was getting at. -read the req. literature -find an interesting problem, something u want to learn more about -defer to literature to try to solve it -if you succeed, write it up IQ matters a lot though.no doubt.
BeetleB 5y ago
> In https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t... he argues that you do not have to be a genius to do first rate mathematics. He says to do mathematics, not "first rate" mathematics.
OscarCunningham 5y ago
The IQ figure of 230 can't be calculated on the usual scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, because if so it would mean that a world with our current population only had a 1 in 57 million chance of containing someone as smart as him. How could we possibly know enough about population statistics to know such a thing? Especially given that we do in fact have him in our world.
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  His IQ is so high, it required several breakthroughs in neostatistics to properly measure it.
  - netr0ute 5y ago
    Is this satire?
    - hyperpallium2 5y ago
      A joke.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Just want to point out that of 7B people, about 122 of them are one in 57 million
  - linschn 5y ago
    I think the parent's point is that you would need 50 something millions worlds like ours to find a single person with such a high IQ score. I haven't checked the maths, but I know the Gaussian distribution is falling fast past a few standard deviation, so such a result would not surprise me.
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      I admit I'm not very informed about what IQ denotes, but wouldn't such a probability need to include the population of the world? Is that a parameter in the calculation of IQ?
carnitine 5y ago
It’s very odd to put Erdos amongst Gauss, Euler and Tao. He was very proficient, but nowhere near as talented.
- jstx1 5y ago
  I also think it's odd to put Tao next to Gauss and Euler. Maybe he's one of the best mathematicians right now but that's different from being the same calibre as the most influential people in the field ever.
  - OscarCunningham 5y ago
    Gauss and Euler had the advantage of living among a much smaller population of mathematicians, and when much low hanging fruit had not yet been discovered. If they were born today they would not reach the same level as Tao.
    - jstx1 5y ago
      Yes, they made a lot of contributions because of the time they lived in (right after calculus was invented but before modern mathematics). Still, you have no way of knowing what they would be able to contribute today and that whole hypothetical is kind of pointless anyway.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        Then your original claim was equally pointless, wasn't it?
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - goatlover 5y ago
      How can you possibly know that Gauss and Euler would have been able to achieve less than Tao? That's a baseless claim.
Rioghasarig 5y ago
> His official IQ of 230 remains the highest officially measured IQ in the world. Terrence Tao doesn't have an official IQ. People like to make up numbers for smart people's IQs.

by btilly 5y ago

dgs_sgd 5y ago

I personally hold him and Jon Von Neumann at a level above everyone else in modern mathematics

civilized 5y ago

I wonder if only geniuses can write "it doesn't take a genius" posts, because making truly hard things easier actually does take a genius.

baetylus 5y ago
That's part of the problem with "genius" - an emphasis on innate talent, excluding hard work or the degree to which the "genius" worked hard.

jhgb 5y ago

> He taught himself to read by age 2. Well, I taught myself to read by the age of 3... > He was taking Calculus at age 7. ...OK, clearly something went awry with me between the ages of 3 and 7.

asddubs 5y ago
i hit my personal rock bottom at age 5. i never recovered
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I flunked kindergarten. (It hurt even at that age.)
  - glitchc 5y ago
    My oldest friend was held back in kindergarten. That’s how I met him.
    - charles_f 5y ago
      My kid is 3.5 and he still believes that 10 comes after 8. I'm deeply worried now.
      - jacobolus 5y ago
        Einstein didn’t speak until age 4, so your kid is probably too precociously verbal to be the world’s most famous physicist.
        andi999 5y ago
        Probably he had to think it through which first words were appropriate.
      - kierkegaard7 5y ago
        Well, he's not wrong...

ACow_Adonis 5y ago

What's the source for some of those claims? Calculus at seven I can believe, but teaching himself reading at 2 sounds like something that goes against what we know about biological and social development of the child. And official IQs of 230 and 300 sounds like someone doesn't understand what IQ is or the meaningfulness of measuring/quantifying such in a standardised way. Obviously the person may be exceptional, and I do not mean to take anything away from Terence in his work that i'm clearly unqualified to comment on (it wouldn't surprise me if a bit of digging shows him unconnected to such claims), but we shouldn't just accept such things as given. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...

AussieWog93 5y ago
>What's the source for some of those claims? Googling it, it seems like the claim that he taught himself to read when he was "a little over two" (ie not literally 24 months) has been repeated among multiple reputable news sources (New York Time, SMH, The Age). No comment on the IQ. >Calculus at seven I can believe, but teaching himself reading at 2 sounds like something that goes against what we know about biological and social development of the child. It doesn't seem too far-fetched, to be honest. Back when my wife worked in child-care, she knew this one kid who was speaking in multi-word sentences at 9 months old. Most kids don't reach this milestone until they're 2 1/2. Kids can and do surprise you.
ip26 5y ago
As a parent I’ve come to believe a lot of the stories about how so and so was playing golf or skiing or playing piano by 3 are very biased retrospectives. My kid was playing notes on harmonica at 18 months. Could he carry a tune? Of course not, but if one day he turned out to be a musical genius I could brag he has been playing instruments since he was an infant. See the careful embellishment? A kid who has memorized some sight words or some books can certainly claim “reading”, with just enough truth there for the tale to take hold when they do well later in life.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  To reinforce this: I remember feeling embarrassed by being described as a “natural” playing guitar. I also remember feeling humbled by my humility when I took guitar seriously and picked stuff up or figured out technique that astounded people.

chaboud 5y ago

Unless he was born on February 29th (good luck getting that drink at a bar), reading after only hitting two birthdays is the stuff of legend. That said, having been told so by a genius, I feel like I'm now unshackled, ready to pursue a life of mathematics as a non-genius.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
This is the correct takeaway! Go learn and explore!
spoonjim 5y ago
My son was reading at age 2. Was definitely not doing calculus at 7.
wutbrodo 5y ago
> reading after only hitting two birthdays is the stuff of legend. I don't think this is quite true. I started reading shortly after my third birthday, and I don't think I just missed the cutoff for "legend". Though any one or two of Tao's other accomplishments fairly easily clear that bar, IMO.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Unless he was born on February 29th (good luck getting that drink at a bar), reading after only hitting two birthdays is the stuff of legend. No it isn't. I would have called it "normal".
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Re-read, or dial down.
jamesdmiller 5y ago
Children with hyperlexia can often learn to read before they are two. I personally knew a children who before the age of two was reading.
sdiupIGPWEfh 5y ago

eyelidlessness 5y ago

Without even reading a single word of it, the non-irony is in your characterization. He taught himself. Ultimately we all taught ourselves and our peers and mentees. Intelligence is mostly rooted in curiosity and attention, not some innate capacity. People who are perceived to be at the lower end of that capacity often inform those who aren’t, and vice versa.

leeoniya 5y ago
> not some innate capacity i would wager a lot of money that no one here has the capacity to approach John von Neumann, Srinivasa Ramanujan or Terence Tao in a single lifetime of unlimited curiosity and attention.

paulpauper 5y ago

an iq of 230 probably does not exist . it is impossible to devise a test accurate enough measure such a high iq .More likely there are probably a hundred people in the world who can be considered the smartest, including Terrance Tao and other prodigies. And that German guy who recently got a Field's Medal. He said to do math, not first-rate math. I have witnessed plenty of seemingly merely above-average-IQ people make interesting, novel contributions to math. Complex analysis, infinite series, matrices, stuff like that.They don't get much media coverage but produce interesting results and produce high quality math..that is probably what he was getting at. -read the req. literature -find an interesting problem, something u want to learn more about -defer to literature to try to solve it -if you succeed, write it up IQ matters a lot though.no doubt.

BeetleB 5y ago

> In https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t... he argues that you do not have to be a genius to do first rate mathematics. He says to do mathematics, not "first rate" mathematics.

OscarCunningham 5y ago

The IQ figure of 230 can't be calculated on the usual scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, because if so it would mean that a world with our current population only had a 1 in 57 million chance of containing someone as smart as him. How could we possibly know enough about population statistics to know such a thing? Especially given that we do in fact have him in our world.

hyperpallium2 5y ago
His IQ is so high, it required several breakthroughs in neostatistics to properly measure it.
- netr0ute 5y ago
  Is this satire?
  - hyperpallium2 5y ago
    A joke.
TchoBeer 5y ago
Just want to point out that of 7B people, about 122 of them are one in 57 million
- linschn 5y ago
  I think the parent's point is that you would need 50 something millions worlds like ours to find a single person with such a high IQ score. I haven't checked the maths, but I know the Gaussian distribution is falling fast past a few standard deviation, so such a result would not surprise me.
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    I admit I'm not very informed about what IQ denotes, but wouldn't such a probability need to include the population of the world? Is that a parameter in the calculation of IQ?

carnitine 5y ago

It’s very odd to put Erdos amongst Gauss, Euler and Tao. He was very proficient, but nowhere near as talented.

jstx1 5y ago
I also think it's odd to put Tao next to Gauss and Euler. Maybe he's one of the best mathematicians right now but that's different from being the same calibre as the most influential people in the field ever.
- OscarCunningham 5y ago
  Gauss and Euler had the advantage of living among a much smaller population of mathematicians, and when much low hanging fruit had not yet been discovered. If they were born today they would not reach the same level as Tao.
  - jstx1 5y ago
    Yes, they made a lot of contributions because of the time they lived in (right after calculus was invented but before modern mathematics). Still, you have no way of knowing what they would be able to contribute today and that whole hypothetical is kind of pointless anyway.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Then your original claim was equally pointless, wasn't it?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - goatlover 5y ago
    How can you possibly know that Gauss and Euler would have been able to achieve less than Tao? That's a baseless claim.

Rioghasarig 5y ago

> His official IQ of 230 remains the highest officially measured IQ in the world. Terrence Tao doesn't have an official IQ. People like to make up numbers for smart people's IQs.