Renowned Australian mathematician Professor Terence Chi-Shen Tao (Terence Tao) has received a top honour in the 2026 King’s Birthday Honours list.
Prof. Tao, known by many in the mathematics community as Terry, was one of five individuals to be awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia (AC)
The appointment was made “for eminent service to the mathematical sciences, to the global mathematics community, and to tertiary education and academia.”
Each year, the King’s Birthday Honours List recognises Australians, including awards in the Order of Australia (General and Military Divisions), meritorious awards and recognition for conspicuous service.
Prof. Tao is an active member of AMSI’s Research Committee. He was also a member of our Advisory Board from 2002 to 2022. AMSI’s first director, Emeritus Professor Garth Gaudry, was Professor Tao’s mentor while he was as a student at Flinders University, South Australia. Terry continues to be a strong advocate for the Australian mathematical sciences community abroad.
Born in Adelaide in 1975, Terry’s incredible mathematical ability was evident from a young age. He is one of just 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 maths section; a milestone he reached at the age of eight.
Terry remains the youngest International Mathematical Olympiad medal winner, earning bronze at the age of 10. He competed in the following two annual events, becoming the youngest winner of each of the three medals in the Olympiad’s history.
At the age of 16, he moved to America to pursue a PhD at Princeton University, New Jersey, before moving to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he’d become the University’s youngest tenured professor at just 24 years old.
In 2006, Terry was awarded the Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, “for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis, and additive number theory.” Other accolades include the MacArthur Fellowship and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.
Dubbed the ‘Mozart of Maths’, Terry continues to work at the UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics where his research focuses on harmonic analysis, PDE, geometric combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, analytic number theory, compressed sensing, and algebraic combinatorics.
A prolific collaborative researcher, Terry has over 350 academic publications to his name. Several of these have garnered international press coverage. Notable examples include:
- The Green-Tao theorem: a landmark result in number theory which states that the infinite sequence of prime numbers contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progression (2004).
- Resolution of the Erdős discrepancy problem, which used entropy estimates within analytic number theory (2015).
- Progress on the Collatz conjecture, in which he proved the probabilistic claim that almost all Collatz orbits attain almost bounded values (2019).
Terry is a long-standing supporter of AMSI; a current member of the AMSI Advisory Panel and previous member of the AMSI Research Committee.
Commenting on the announcement, AMSI Director Prof. Tim Marchant said: “Like Terry, I also grew up in South Australia: I remember him, as a young boy, coming into the Adelaide University Department of Maths in the mid–1980s. Since those early days he has risen to become one of the world’s finest mathematicians.”
Photo courtesy of UCLA
