Mathematical Olympiad, first competing at the age of ten; in 1986, 1987, and 1988, he won a bronze, silver, and gold medal, respectively. Tao remains the youngest winner of each of the three medals in the Olympiad's history, having won the gold medal at the age of 13 in 1988. Career At age 14, Tao attended the Research Science Institute, a summer program for secondary students. In 1991, he received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the age of 16 from Flinders University under the direction of Garth Gaudry. In 1992, he won a Postgraduate Fulbright Scholarship to undertake research in mathematics at Princeton University in the United States. From 1992 to 1996, Tao was a graduate student at Princeton University under the direction of Elias Stein, receiving his PhD at the age of 21. In 1996, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1999, when he was 24, he was promoted to full professor at UCLA and remains the youngest person ever appointed to that rank by the institution. He is known for his collaborative mindset; by 2006, Tao had worked with over 30 others in his discoveries, reaching 68 co-authors by October 2015. Tao has had a particularly extensive collaboration with British mathematician Ben J. Green; together they proved the Green–Tao theorem, which is well-known among both amateur and professional mathematicians. This theorem states that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers. The New York Times described it this way: Many other results of Tao have received mainstream attention in the scientific press, including: his establishment of finite time blowup for a modification of the famous Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness Millennium Problem his 2015 resolution of the Erdős discrepancy problem, which used entropy estimates within analytic number theory his 2019 progress on the Collatz conjecture, in which he proved the probabilistic claim that almost all Collatz orbits attain almost bounded values. Tao has also resolved or made progress on a number of conjectures. In 2012, Green and Tao announced proofs of the conjectured "orchard-planting problem," which asks for the maximum number of lines through exactly 3 points in a set of n points in the plane, not all on a line. In 2018, with Brad Rodgers, Tao showed that the de Bruijn–Newman constant, the nonpositivity of which is equivalent to the Riemann hypothesis, is nonnegative. In 2020, Tao proved Sendov's conjecture,