Terence Chi-Shen Tao (; born 17 July 1975) is an Australian and American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins chair. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing and analytic number theory. Tao was born to ethnic Chinese immigrant parents and raised in Adelaide. Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006 and won the Royal Medal and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014. He is also a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. Tao has been the author or co-author of over three hundred research papers. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians and has been referred to as the "Mozart of mathematics". Life and career Family Tao's parents are first-generation immigrants from Hong Kong to Australia. Tao's father, Billy Tao (), was a Chinese paediatrician who was born in Shanghai and earned his medical degree (MBBS) from the University of Hong Kong in 1969. Tao's mother, Grace Leong (), was born in Hong Kong; she received a first-class honours degree in astrophysics and mathematics at the University of Hong Kong. She was a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics in Hong Kong. Billy and Grace met as students at the University of Hong Kong. They then emigrated from Hong Kong to Australia in 1972. Tao also has two brothers (Trevor and Nigel), who are living in Australia. Both formerly represented the country at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Tao speaks Cantonese but cannot write Chinese. Tao is married to Laura Tao, a Chinese-American woman who is an electrical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They live with their son and daughter (William and Madeleine) in Los Angeles, California. Childhood A child prodigy, Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only three children in the history of the Johns Hopkins' Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just eight years old; Tao scored a 760. Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, stated that Tao had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching. Tao was the youngest participant to date in the International