The Youngest Fields Medal Winner

"A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see - and hits it. " may be the perfect quote to introduce Terry Tao ,the winner of fields medal of 2006 at an age of 31.He has become the youngest Fields Medal winner in international mathematics community.Fields Medal is considered to be the noble prize in mathematics.
Born on 17 July 1975 and schooled in Adelaide,Australia, Terry participated in International Mathematical Olympiad three times in the years of 1986,1987,1988 at an astonishing age of 11,12 and 13 years and won bronze,silver and gold medals successively.He was the only person ever to achieve IMO gold medal without having reached the age of 13.
A Chinese by ethnicity, this man received his PhD degree under the supervision of Elias M Stein, at an age of 20.In 2004 he along with Ben Green published a paper on the arithmetic progression of prime numbers.According to The New York Times
"In 2004, Dr. Tao, along with Ben Green, a mathematician now at the University of Cambridge in England, solved a problem related to the Twin Prime Conjecture by looking at prime number progressions — series of numbers equally spaced. (For example, 3, 7 and 11 constitute a progression of prime numbers with a spacing of 4; the next number in the sequence, 15, is not prime.) Dr. Tao and Dr. Green proved that it is always possible to find, somewhere in the infinity of integers, a progression of prime numbers of equal spacing and any length."
This is now known as the Green-Tao theorem.Tao has developed techniques to simplify the equations describing general Relativity as well as Quantum Mechanics governing the way light moves inside fiber optic cable.
Terence Tao is currently working as a professor in UCLA.He worked primarily on Harmonic analysis,Analytic Number Theory,partial Differential Equations,Combinatorics and Representation Theory.
In 2006, other than the Fields Medal he also won SASTRA Ramanujan Prize and on 18 May 2007 he was elected as a fellow of prestigious Royal Society.
For more information about Tao and his work visit www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/