Collaborate with Terence Tao Whenever the Math Urge Strikes

November 11, 2009

Fields medalist Terence Tao (University of California, Los Angeles) has turned his blog into a graduate mathematics seminar open to the general public.  

Tao started the blog in 2007 as a way to update his faculty page. Traffic was minimal at first, until a post comparing quantum mechanics to the videogame Tomb Raider received 57 reader comments. Tao began posting class notes, lecture slides, open questions, and comments, and by September 2007 traffic to his site reached 125,000 page views a month.

According to an article in Forbes, Tao's blog "is well written and spends little time watering down concepts for the public." Nevertheless, his audience is not limited to mathematicians, but includes amateurs with an interest in math and readers in developing countries without access to advanced university courses.

Last winter Tao began an experiment alongside a fellow Fields medalist, University of Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers, to work with readers on aspects of the Hales-Jewett theorem. The readers responded, posting 1,200 comments in two months and generating several new advances in this difficult topic.

Tao's blog, along with several other serious math blogs, are changing the dynamic between the public and some of the world's preeminent thinkers. Internet collaboration, Tao said, provides "an open record into the trial-and-error process of solving a mathematical problem." Anyone reading his blog can see the process of hypotheses offered and rebuttals demolishing them.

In addition to providing a forum to discuss, for example, the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function or to work on Yang-Mills theory, Tao's blog also provides career advice and resources to develop one's writing style.

Source: Forbes, Oct. 29, 2009.