Terence Tao Quotes

I was always good at math and science and physics.

I've always enjoyed mathematics. It is the most precise and concise way of expressing any idea.

The standard high school curriculum traditionally has been focused towards physics and engineering. So calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra have always been the most emphasized, and for good reason - these are very important.

I preferred to use mathematics in some practical fashion and thought that meteorology sounded promising.

I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus.

I was a good student with mathematical ability and interests. As such, I took the usual college preparatory program in high school for one looking to become an engineer: all the available courses in mathematics and science.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

Plus, I was a math and science whiz from my first introduction to the subjects.

Over the centuries, monumental upheavals in science have emerged time and again from following the leads set out by mathematics.

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

My interests started about in science and in mathematics; I always thought I was going to be a mathematician.

I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account.

You kind of alluded to it in your introduction. I mean, for the last 300 or so years, the exact sciences have been dominated by what is really a good idea, which is the idea that one can describe the natural world using mathematical equations.

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world

An ounce of algebra is worth of a ton of verbal argument.

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

I am completely obsessed with numbers and data. I have become a scientist in later life.

For Israel to retain its amazing position as the largest concentration of high tech after Silicon Valley, we need more engineers and mathematicians. We have too many lawyers.

I like science and mathematics. When I say mathematics, I don't mean algebra or math in that sense, but the mathematics of things.

Math makes sense when you apply it to projects.

I would say out of all the things I studied growing up, math was probably one of the things that I liked the least.

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.

It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible information about physical processes.