“Terence Tao”:http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/, an Australian now working at UCLA, has won a “Fields medal”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/maths-man-is-number-one/2006/08/22/1156012542775.html?page=fullpage. I’m naturally very pleased to see an Australian Fields medallist. I also knew Prof Tao a little back when I was a high school maths student and he was a remarkable prodigy, having just become the youngest person to win a Maths Olympiad gold medal. I’ve always had this image, I think more from movies than anything else, that prodigies like that tend to burn out. Clearly he didn’t.

To give you a sense of how broad Tao’s work is, the work on prime numbers that was highlighted in the Fields citation is the seventh category heading on his preprints page. And he’s either editor or an editorial board member on four journals. Some days I think I need to work harder. In the meantime, congratulations to Professor Tao for some really remarkable accomplishments.