This site is currently hosting
- updates on my mathematical research;
- expository articles (such as my articles for the Princeton Companion to Mathematics);
- discussion of open problems;
- talks that I have given or attended (such as the Distinguished Lectures Series at UCLA);
- my advice on mathematical careers and mathematical writing;
- information about my books;
- my lecture notes on ergodic theory and on the Poincaré conjecture;
- a campaign to support mathematics, statistics, and computing at the University of Southern Queensland;
- and various other topics, usually related to mathematics.
While most of the posts are aimed at those with a graduate maths background, I will also occasionally have a number of non-technical posts aimed at a lay mathematical audience.I welcome comments from people with all kinds of mathematical backgrounds and levels of expertise; my only requests are that the discussions are kept constructive, polite, and at least tangentially relevant to the topic at hand. Comments which are spam, self-promoting, off-topic, or otherwise not fulfilling the above requests will be summarily deleted. Also, comments which essentially duplicate previous comments may also be deleted, or used to replace the previous comment, as appropriate.
Any discussion, feedback, questions or suggestions not related to one of these topics can be placed as a comment to this “About” page, or at my open thread. Comments about formatting and presentation can be made at this page.
Terence Tao
[Update, Mar 31 2007: Opened this page to comments.]
— Some technical remarks —
WordPress has the ability to insert LaTeX math displays (e.g. 
There are some minor glitches with the wordpress LaTeX installation. One of these is that any LaTeX code beginning with a bracket [ will not compile correctly. A hack to fix this is to prefix the [ with a brace pair {}.
WordPress also supports a certain amount of HTML. As a consequence, be careful with using the < and > signs in a comment, they may be misinterpreted as HTML tags! You can use < and > instead. (Inside of a LaTeX environment, you can use \lt and \gt.)
In case a comment really gets mangled up by formatting errors, you can contact me and I can try to manually correct it.
I have heard that it is possible to configure wordpress so that comments can be previewed; if anyone has any specific knowledge on how to implement that feature, I would appreciate knowing about it. [Removed, Apr 8 2007, in response to comments.]
If a comment does not immediately appear after you submit it, it may have been accidentally flagged as spam (this in particular can happen for a post with an excessive number of links). In that case, please contact me and I will de-flag it.
– Copyright etc. –
Readers are welcome to copy, quote, or translate reasonable portions of the content of this blog (e.g. a single article) into other media, as long as a reference to the URL that the content originates from is provided. If you wish to copy a significantly larger fraction of the content (e.g. an entire series of articles), please contact me about it first.
32 comments
Comments feed for this article
8 April, 2007 at 8:21 am
thomas1111
About prewiewing comments (which I was interested in too): this feature is not available at wordpress.com for security reasons, according to this answer of a wordpress.com person.
On the other hand wordpress.org releases software for people to run a blog either on their own server or on recommended hosts. In both cases this requires some unix/linux administrator skills, especially on security issues in the first case.
In that setting, previewing comments is then possible using plugins: there are many possibilities, for example this one has live preview. Besides,
display in the main posts is also available via this pluging (requires apparently a small manual change in the code to enable LaTeX in comments too). But I’m not sure how the LaTeX then interacts with comment preview, probably some further hacking is required (which almost means back to square one as far as I’m concerned, so I gave up on that).
22 August, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Gary
Dear Prof Tao,
There is a 9 years old, Hong Kong talented kid, got A in GSE A level. Very talented in Math, but probably no HK university accept him.
Do you have any suggestion to him? Since you are a genius as well.
http://hkstandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?we_cat=4&art_id=51052&sid=14893640&con_type=1&d_str=20070811
22 August, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Terence Tao
It depends on many, many factors, including the development of the child in both academic and non-academic areas, and the situation of the parents and the university, and so forth. The one thing I would say though that going to university at such a young age purely for the chance to hold some sort of record is a very bad idea; these records ultimately don’t mean very much in the long run, and if the child is not ready it can actually be harmful to pursue these things. But if the child has already gotten everything he can from the high school level (and this includes social development as well as academic), and is eager for more, and the parents and university are both sufficiently flexible, then it might be something to seriously consider. See my page
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifted-education/
for more thoughts in these directions.
6 October, 2007 at 7:26 am
Jonathan Yedidia
Dear Prof. Tao,
You have a great blog, but could you please turn off the terrible Snap preview feature? Besides being incredibly annoying, it sometimes slows down the loading of your pages to unbearable lengths (I can tell because my browser stalls while trying to load pages from ixnp.com, which is Snap preview.) You can remove the Snap preview feature by going to the wordpress dashboard, and then looking under Presentation, and “Extras”.
6 October, 2007 at 9:00 am
Terence Tao
Hmm. I never noticed the loading times myself, but I could see that it would be a concern. I’ve disabled it for now.
6 October, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Jonathan Yedidia
Thank you! I think that most of the time, if you have a broadband connection, the delay is not noticeable, although I understand it is a problem for those with dial-up connections. Occasionally though (like last night for me) if there is a problem with the Snap Preview servers, your blog can become completely unreachable, even for those of us with good connections, while other wordpress.com blogs that have turned Snap Preview off are reachable. Given that the feature probably annoys more people than it helps even when it works, I can’t understand why wordpress.com turned it on by default.
6 October, 2007 at 8:48 pm
James Cook
I have always liked the Snap Preview feature, and have never experienced any problems with it, so I hope the disabling is temporary. It is especially useful for mathematics blogs such as this, since it allows one to quickly review the definition of a term, for example, without having to leave the site or open a new window.
6 December, 2007 at 2:49 am
Caroline
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11 January, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Anton
Dear Prof. Tao,
Could you, please, recommend me some French blogs about mathematics? I find it really useful to train my language skills.
Thank you in advance,
Anton.
25 February, 2008 at 8:09 am
Nishu
it still hows snap previews to me …
And more so a mathematics site referring to other mathematical resource dont need to show preview of site visitors are going to…Even in preview what a visitor can see will be mostly text.. so doesnt make much difference
25 February, 2008 at 9:42 am
Terence Tao
Dear Nishu,
After some discussion (see http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/snap-preview/ ), I decided to re-enable snap preview for Wikipedia articles but disable them for others (though I am not able to prevent all such previews from showing up, for various technical reasons).
28 February, 2008 at 5:49 am
Anonymous
Hi Prof Tao,
I was doing some work on Prime numbers(specifically Twin Primes) and found a strange (seems like not so obvious) property amongst the Twin Primes. I have checked it just to a small number of Twin Prime Pairs (all the Twin Primes occouring upto 2.7 x 10^7) and that holds well within that limit with no exception.
It is a method for generating of the N+1th Twin Prime Pair using the previous N Twin Prime Pairs. I am able to generate a set of Pairs one of which in the N+1th Twin Prime Pair.
Have checked this for all the Twin Primes up to 2.7 x 10^7 and it holds with no exception.
If Proven that it is always Possible to generate the N+1th Twin Prime Pair ALWAYS using the previous N Twin Primes Pairs then it will also Prove the Twin Prime Conjecture.
But as this is currently a conjecture so am not sure what to do to bring it to the Attention of the Maths community. Can you please guide me on this.
Thanks in Advance
An Amateur (Can’t call Myself a Mathematician)
16 March, 2008 at 9:39 am
Vishal
Dear Prof Tao,
This is a rather silly question, but how do you put a box around some text in your posts?
21 March, 2008 at 9:27 am
anonymous
Dear Professor Tao,
Another silly question: I personally find it very annoying to have to type “$ latex … $” to use latex in wordpress, rather than just “$ … $”. But it seems like you have become quite adept at this. Did you just get used to typing the extra “latex”, or perhaps do you use another program to replace all “$ … $”s with “$ latex … $”s?
Response to above comment: probably < blockquote> < /blockquote>
Thank you
21 March, 2008 at 11:13 am
Vishal
Dear anonymous,
I type “$ latex $” first, then copy it and paste it wherever/whenever I need it while writing posts. You can insert your Latex code inside “$latex $” every time you paste it. I would certainly be interested in knowing if there is a more efficient way of doing the same!
The blockquote tag ideally should work but it only places the text in a block without the border. I want the border to be visible.
Cheers!
21 March, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Terence Tao
Dear Vishal,
I use blockquote but I have modified the CSS of the Tarski theme to make blockquotes in boxes instead of indented and italicised. The precise CSS I used (which I adapted from someone else’s CSS file) is
blockquote {
border-top:1px solid #000;
border-bottom:1px solid #000;
border-left:1px solid #000;
border-right:1px solid #000;
background:#FFFFFF;
color:#000;
margin:25px 25px 15px;
padding:5px 10px 0;
}
As for the $latex $ thing, I just type it in by hand, and it has become fairly automatic to me at this point; it turns out not to be the dominant contributing cost for me to the time it takes to write one of these posts.
24 April, 2008 at 8:24 pm
utgalois4234
Hi Professor Tau,
I was curious how you produced Theorem/Proof/Equation type environments in your lecture posts. I initially just tried rather naively typing something like
but of course this doesn’t work. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much.
24 April, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Terence Tao
Dear utgalois,
I don’t believe that wordpress supports LaTeX environments; I use HTML markup (boldface, blockquote, etc.) instead to simulate them instead. (It means that I have to number theorems etc. by hand, but that’s only a minor inconvenience.)
25 April, 2008 at 2:33 pm
louisyangliu
Dear Prof. Tao,
In LaTex environment, as we know, we can use $$…$$ to make equations to the center of a line, and you can also make them in wordpress very prettily and nicely. I am curious how to make them. Thanks.
25 April, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Terence Tao
Dear Louis,
One can simulate a display environment by centering a latex string (in HTML), and using \displaystyle to make the formatting of large symbols (e.g. \sum, \prod, \int, etc.) come out nicely. It’s a hack, but it works.
One thing I haven’t figured out how to do nicely, though, is to how to align multiple equations other than manually inserting spacing. Also, I don’t know how to right-justify equation numbers, which is a little annoying.
26 April, 2008 at 2:23 am
Américo Tavares
Dear Professor Tao,
Would you please give me a hint how do you manage to insert here diagrams like the one in your post http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/09/14/pythagoras-theorem/ ?
As a matter of fact I have in mind an even more basic question, that is, where can I find information on constructing geometric figures by means of LaTeX?
26 April, 2008 at 3:46 am
Anonymous
Hai ,Mr Tao, I am currently pursuing an undergraduate course in India, i would
like to know how to solve intricate(complex) math problems, i want to know how could solve complex problems so well,do you follow any specific problem solving strategies,how to become an excellent problem solver like you are there any specific character traits in order to become one??? please answer these queries Mr Tao i would be extremely grateful to you, thanking you
Your admirer….
26 April, 2008 at 10:59 am
Indian
Mr TAO ,if u read the above Anonymous query and yet didn’t answer it, you might be thinking i am some sort of an impostor ,please don’t think like that, i am not an impostor or some sort of a prankster,please answer the above query,maybe it isn’t related to mathematics in some way but it is very much related to problem solving as a whole and this includes multitudinous disciplines like Mathematics,Physics etc.
Can you give me some tips on how to solve tough problems,if you read this query and yet didn’t like to answer you can tell me (by commenting here) i would not ask this sort of query again, i want an answer from an excellent problem solver like you ,please do answer my query if you like to….
Please don’t think i am some kind of a fraud or prankster ,i am genuine and the reason for not me including my complete details is that i am ab it insecure and i am concerned about my privacy.. Thanking you,
Your humble and sincere admirer
26 April, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Terence Tao
Dear Indian,
Please see
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/solving-mathematical-problems/
for my thoughts on these sorts of issues.
27 April, 2008 at 12:41 am
tumur
Dear Américo Tavares,
There are packages called texdraw, and pstricks. If you use these packages you have to draw line by line so to speak, so it takes much time. So normally you would use some external software to produce a picture file and include into a tex document. Adobe Illustrator is excellent, and a cheaper but simpler alternative would be xfig. Also there are gimp and Photoshop of course.
27 April, 2008 at 12:47 am
tumur
There are also specialized applications like geomac that comes handy when you do plane geometry constructions.
27 April, 2008 at 2:37 am
Américo Tavares
Dear tumur,
Many thanks for your information.
I will look for the packages/applications you have mentioned.
Currently I’m using Scientific Work Place (Scientific Word, Scientific Viewer, Note Book) that does not allow me to produce the LaTeX code of geometry constructions, only plain LaTeX or TeX documents, with plots inserted if needed, then generates a dvi file that can be converted to the pdf format.
27 April, 2008 at 6:01 pm
damidami
Dear prof. Tao,
I don’t know where to ask this but, how do you make the latex formulas look “grayer” (brighter) and not black.
If you don’t understand what I mean you could look at my blog http://analisis2.wordpress.com, my formulas can’t be easily separated from the text, visually speaking.
I’m just starting this blog for my students, so I have a lot to learn on to how to present the information.
Thanks a lot,
Damián.
27 April, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Terence Tao
Dear damidami,
I didn’t make the latex grayer; I made the text darker (a trick I learned from Carl Brannen). This was accomplished by modifying the CSS (you need to purchase an upgrade for this). The precise CSS I used was
body {
background:#fff;
color:#000;
}
It is possible to change the colour of LaTeX displays too, see
http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/02/18/can-i-put-math-or-equations-in-my-posts/
but it is somewhat cumbersome (there appears to be no way to permanently change the default colour).
29 April, 2008 at 11:07 am
Indian
Dear Mr Tao,i would like to know how do you get such good solutions to intricate problems,do you rely on your intuition or is it just through brute mental power????
4 May, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Rolando
I am extremely interested in these posts and I would like to copy them into a LaTex file, but when I paste the $ signs are removed. Is there a better way than manually adding in the $ signs?
5 May, 2008 at 1:09 am
John Armstrong
Rolando, it should be short work with a regular expression parser like perl. Take the page source — for instance
WordPress has the ability to insert LaTeX math displays (e.g. <img src='http://l.wordpress.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cint_%7B-%5Cinfty%7D%5E%5Cinfty+e%5E%7B-%5Cpi+x%5E2%7D%5C+dx+%3D+1&bg=ffffff&fg=545454&s=0' alt='\int_{-\infty}^\infty e^{-\pi x^2}\ dx = 1' title='\int_{-\infty}^\infty e^{-\pi x^2}\ dx = 1' class='latex' />) into both posts and comments.Notice that the LaTeX code itself is in the source field of the img tag. You just have to replace what goes before and after with $, and replace all the URL escape codes with the actual symbols (%5C = \).