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What's so great about Tao, anyway? There's shitload of stuff named after Euler or Gauss, what's the most important "Tao theorem" or "Tao identity"? What has he discovered that people should care about?
Apropos of nothing, on this very thread a few months ago people (@Soteriologian ) were pooh-poohing the capabilities of AI:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3771/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/448459?context=8#context
Not so obvious now, is it?
Oh, how the tables turn...
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My very loose understanding is that your Euler and Gauss came about in an earlier period of Mathematical ability on the part of the series and thus could 'pick more fruit' by want of more lower-hanging fruit and less competition. Tao's very impressive for coming through in a period where crossing between different subclades of Mathematics has become very very rare and managing to push a bunch of different areas forward even if not as transformatively overall as a Euler or a Gauss. Tao's also known for being very capable of communicating like a normal human being for somebody of his mathematical horsepower and therefore tends to be a lot better at collaborating with other mathematicians than a lot of other 'very brilliant but spiky and 8SD autist' mathematicians at that end of the spectrum of human ability.
Hypothetical 'Terrence Tao is born in Euler's Basel at the same point as Euler was and vice-versa' stuff is always going to be hard to argue/measure, too
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He’s widely considered the best living mathematician, really he’s the most famous and certainly one of the best.
The Green-Tao theorem proves there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes, and an arithmetic progression is a sequence of numbers with constant difference, like
(3, 7, 11)and(14, 19, 24, 29). He made progress in many other unsolved conjectures, including Collatz and Navier-Stokes.He did manage one practical contribution: reducing lung MRI scan times. His work may eventually also improve cryptography (I remember this SMBC comic featuring Tao and already improved cryptography, but it’s about how someone else’s theoretical contribution found practical applications).
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There's the Green-Tao theorem, which was probably the number theory finding of the decade when it came out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%E2%80%93Tao_theorem
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