Terence Tao Quotes

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.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get 'Calculus for the Practical Man.' By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics.

Fewer than 13 percent of high school students will continue to study math and science in college—usually the most well-prepared and persistent students who often come from families where encouragement and enrichment is fundamental

As more girls get basic schooling, larger numbers will move up the educational ladder - some to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. That's important because workplaces around the world, especially in many developing and emerging-market countries, are becoming more automated, favouring workers with technical skills.

My mom is a science teacher in high school, and one of my brothers works in optics at Bell Labs, and so I was always surrounded by it.

We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.

As an undergraduate at Columbia, I went to the engineering school. I had a great deal of training in engineering and mathematics as well as subdiversified training. And then I went to the California Institute of Technology to do my Ph.D. in applied math.

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

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment - my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge - which is mathematical, essentially - can have a playful visual element to it.

I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics.

At Tenafly High, I was lucky to have some dedicated teachers; I'm especially indebted to my calculus instructor, Francis Piersa, who opened my eyes to the striking beauty of mathematics.

I went to a liberal arts college, and as part of my background, I was majoring in mathematics and physics.

One of the reasons I like working with schools is to try to convince women that they can be scientists and that science can be fun.

I was going to engineering school but fell in love with physics.

We want kids to think that they can think about science. They don't need to just play soccer.

Nearly 90 percent of high school graduates say they’re not interested in a career or a college major involving science, technology, engineering or math…

Fifty percent of our high schools do not even offer calculus—no one in those schools can take calculus.

We have a problem in Africa with our education system. It is a relic from the past. The education system was meant to create clerks to help the administrative role of the colonial power. So the emphasis was on neat handwriting and how to write good reports and things like that, and if you move further, then you study Shakespeare and Molière. But we don’t have enough engineers and scientists. Two percent of African university graduates study agriculture, when 70 percent of our people are living off the land. Obviously, we have a problem.

The most important resource of counties of the future will be the number of math trained brains.

Growing up in Highland Park, in high school, I had some very influential teachers: I had a math teacher who taught calculus that helped me learn to be in love with mathematics; I had a chemistry teacher who inspired us to work what was in the class and to go beyond.

Most students who take math classes aren't going to be mathematicians. They're going to be engineers, statisticians - in many ways, that's the more important mission of math education.

If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).

We must establish all over the country schools of our own to train our own children to become scientists, to become mathematicians. We must realize the need for adult education and for job retraining programs that will emphasize a changing society in which automation plays the key role. We intend to use the tools of education to help raise our people to an unprecedented level of excellence and self respect through their own efforts.