Terence Tao Quotes

You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math.

Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.

The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it.

The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.

Mathematicians aren't motivated by money and material gain, or even by practical applications of their work. For us it's the glory of solving one of the great unsolved problems that have outwitted previous generations of mathematicians. …. Despite all the things we've discovered over the last 7 millennia, there are still many things we don't understand.

I love that once you know the basic rules of maths, you can do whatever you want with it.

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.

I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.

The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.

Mathematicians are stiff abstract guys. They'll tell you they don't need the physical world. But then when I show them my bubbles they're like little children.

Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.

I've run a lot of miles over the years, some fast and some not so fast. I've won some big races and I've had some big disappointments, but I enjoy the freedom of running and the challenge of training and competition as much now as when I first started back in high school.

I really like research.

I like - I love calculus. I love linear algebra, probability and statistics, that kind of stuff. I just really like that.

Fractions, decimals, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, mechanics - these are the steps up the mountain side. How high is one going to get? For me, the pinnacle was Projective Geometry. Who today has even heard of this branch of mathematics?

I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.

Mathematicians are fairly cheap.

I'm a guy that's all about not trying to take the easy way out or get out of things too early.

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

I haven't met anybody who hasn't been able to describe years and years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of achieving anything whatsoever. And there's no way to sort of get around that.

Almost anything difficult, any challenge takes time, patience, and hard work.