This episode of pplpod traces the extraordinary life of Terence Tao, widely considered one of the greatest living mathematicians. Born in Adelaide, Australia in 1975 to highly educated immigrant parents from Hong Kong, Tao scored 760 on the SAT math section at age eight, won three International Mathematical Olympiad medals between ages 10 and 12 (still the youngest ever to win each), earned his PhD from Princeton at 21, and became a full professor at UCLA at 24. The hosts examine why Tao defied the typical child prodigy burnout, growing instead into the academic world's "Mr. Fix-It" thanks to a rare generalist mind that bridges fields most mathematicians treat as separate continents. They walk through his most consequential breakthroughs: the Green-Tao theorem, which proved that prime numbers contain arithmetic progressions of any length; his com ...