Mathematics Professor Terence Tao will be awarded the 2008 Alan T. Waterman Award, the National Science Foundation’s highest honor, on May at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C..
Tao also won the Fields Medal in 2006, an honor in mathematics often seen as an equivalent to the Nobel Prize, and is the first mathematics professor at UCLA to have won it, according to UCLA’s press release.
According to the National Science Foundation’s Web site, the Waterman Award annually selects an outstanding young researcher in any science or engineering field supported by the National Science Foundation with a research grant of $500,000 over three years.
Tao’s focus is on harmonic analysis, and he also works on other fields such as nonlinear partial differential equations, algebraic geometry, number theory and combinatorics, according to a university press release.
Ben Green, mathematics professor at Cambridge University and collaborator with Tao, said he thinks his colleague deserves the award and is sure that he will make good use of the research grant.
“Professor Tao brings quite a lot more to the table than other people. He has a broader range of knowledge than most people,” Green said. “I think for sure he’s without doubt one of the top mathematicians in the past 20 years.”
Brian Benson, a fourth-year mathematics student at the Georgia Institute of Technology who had previously attended two of Tao’s lectures, said he remembers Tao was able to give very clear lectures.
“He started out very simply to try to give examples of the problem, to explain the sort of problems (that are) too complicated to understand at first,” Benson said.
Tao declined requests for an interview.