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Comment by alkibiades | Hacker News Reader

so has he accomplished anything big/groundbreaking other than being a child prodigy and having a high iq?

serious question. i only know his name for being smart. not anything specific

He won the fields medal, which is the effectively the Nobel prize for math, and has been cited nearly 100k times. Academically, these are extremely high level achievements. He’s contributed across very diverse fields of math, so it’s difficult to pin down his contributions to one thing in particular, but his most cited papers are fundamental to compressed sensing, which is both theoretically interesting and practically useful

Off the top of my head, two big accomplishments are compressed sensing and the existence of arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in the primes (the Green-Tao Theorem, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green–Tao_theorem). But there is more than that. It’s a very googleable question.

Have you tried asking your favourite search engine or even chat bot?

See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao#Research_contribut...

Being a great mathematicians not all about solving Millennium Prize Problems or being a household name like Einstein.

I don’t know, I keep hearing about the Tao of this, or the Tao of that.

I am sure no one has ever ever called him “The Tao of Math” before, but they have now! He is in it. Everywhere!

Legacy Achievement: locked in :)

I will implore you or anyone to ask ChatGPT to “eli5 compressive sensing”. It was a fun honeymoon day for me with ChatGPT when I did that.

Interesting, but my first answers are essentially - use some clever math.

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