Terence Tao on Mathematics
From the introduction to a 3-hour conversation between Terence Tao and Lex Fridman.
Terence Tao is widely considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history. He won the Fields Medal and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, and has contributed to a wide range of fields from fluid dynamics with Navier-Stokes equations to mathematical physics & quantum mechanics, prime numbers & analytics number theory, harmonic analysis, compressed sensing, random matrix theory, combinatorics, and progress on many of the hardest problems in the history of mathematics.
The interview is available as a single video. More accessibly, Fridman has broken the 3 hours up into many short (~5-minute) videos. What I found particularly striking is the extent to which Tao expresses how he thinks in intuitive terms. This doesn’t mean that everyone will understand everything he says. But anyone with a basic sense of what mathematics is and what it’s about should be able to appreciate Tao’s simplicity and clarity of thought.