What is it like to work with the mathematician Terence Tao?
1 Answer
Obviously it's great -- looking at his publication list, you can see he has a bajillion coauthors, many repeat offenders.
More specifically, one thing I learned from Terry that I was not taught in school is the importance of bad proofs. I would say "I think this is true", work on it, see that there was no nice proof, and give up. Terry would say "Here's a criterion that eliminates most of the problem. Then in what's left, here's a worse one that handles most of the detritus. One or two more epicycles. At that point it comes down to fourteen cases, and I checked them." Yuck. But we would know it was true, and we would move on. (Usually these would get cleaned up a fair bit before publication.)
Or else I would say "I wonder if this is true" and Terry would say "Oh, it is for a while, but it starts to fail in six dimensions" where I hadn't hardly exhausted the 3-dimensional case. That would get kind of spooky sometimes.
Sometimes we'd really be on the same page, at the same letter of the same word even; one extreme case was when I needed to read his computer code and found it as easy to do as if I'd written it myself. But more often we'd bring different strengths. Since we were working in my field of expertise rather than his, I knew better what the interesting questions were, and could translate them into combinatorics, then sic Terry on them. He would beat them to a bloody death as described above, and then it would be my job to dress the carcass for public viewing back in the original field.
More specifically, one thing I learned from Terry that I was not taught in school is the importance of bad proofs. I would say "I think this is true", work on it, see that there was no nice proof, and give up. Terry would say "Here's a criterion that eliminates most of the problem. Then in what's left, here's a worse one that handles most of the detritus. One or two more epicycles. At that point it comes down to fourteen cases, and I checked them." Yuck. But we would know it was true, and we would move on. (Usually these would get cleaned up a fair bit before publication.)
Or else I would say "I wonder if this is true" and Terry would say "Oh, it is for a while, but it starts to fail in six dimensions" where I hadn't hardly exhausted the 3-dimensional case. That would get kind of spooky sometimes.
Sometimes we'd really be on the same page, at the same letter of the same word even; one extreme case was when I needed to read his computer code and found it as easy to do as if I'd written it myself. But more often we'd bring different strengths. Since we were working in my field of expertise rather than his, I knew better what the interesting questions were, and could translate them into combinatorics, then sic Terry on them. He would beat them to a bloody death as described above, and then it would be my job to dress the carcass for public viewing back in the original field.
