The Test That Terence Tao Almost Failed

So he nearly failed? I bet I could totally fail it.

This is why I'm better than Terence. He was unable to fail. So close but couldnt do it. I, on the other hand, can fail it, without any effort.

He passed Princeton's qualifier at 18... Mind-boggling.

I went to an engineering school and saw a lot of this, though at a much lower level. Smart kid coasts through high school and is never challenged enough that they have to developer study skills. Then they crash and burn in the first term at university because it's the first time they've encountered something that's genuinely hard for them. It can be a tough lesson.

I remember my oral exam in analysis. It was 2 hours in length as well. Two professors (one of them known to be harsh!) summoned me to a class room. They started to ask me about what do I know about the norms L^1, L^2 and L^\infity. I gave definitions and how L^2 is special as it's Hilbert space. After several minutes one of them asked me to state and prove a fundamental result in measure theory. I stated it well but struggled to prove it (one direction was easy, but the converse was hard). One of the professors was telling me to try and consider a simpler case. I couldn't see it. I stalled for 2-3 minutes, but seemed an eternity. My head felt hot and I was sweating, anxious and I thought it was all over. Tears were sliding down my eyes. I concealed them while looking at the black board. Then, totally unexpectedly, before they said to move on the next question, I remembered a definition involving absolutely continuous functions and used the Radon-Nikodym theorem and I proved it! The next and final question was, to me, a standard Holder inequality result. I passed!

Hi Tibees, thanks for this wonderful video, it makes me think about my failures, which should make me stronger. I used to think failures make me weak, but this is a really good paradigm shift.

lol i actually had a pretty awkward encounter with professor tao in my first year of college. i’m a psych major but one day i was exploring campus and ended up near the pure math building. i saw professor tao talking to a student as he exited the building and i didn’t know what to do lol. kinda wanted to say hi or something. i was thinking back to my high school calculus teacher who always raved about tao. he really wanted me to become a math major and told me to say hi for him. so i did and instantly wanted to disappear forever. i don’t even know why. maybe i just felt so out of place being in that part of campus with the amazing terence tao. i just wanted to run away at that point but luckily dr. tao was really chill and said hello back. i haven’t been back there since but i do think about that interaction a lot.

One of my favorite videos you've ever put out.

Wow! What a terrific mathematical story. Great for Terrence. You're wonderful Toby.

thank you tibees. Your video gave me courage to continue my studies.

Another day of learning. Thanks Toby, always a joy to watch and learn.

Great video. Thank you. I am truly humbled when I encounter most graduate level mathematics. It's like a foreign language to me, and I have a undergrad degree in math. It's not easy even for the brightest minds.

In the end, it was humility that saved him.

Keep up the great videos, Toby!

Great and thoroughly well explained - Thank you! Also, your voice is very calming and well articulated :)

This guy is the best mathematician alive. Absolute genius. Lots of interesting stuff, thanks. PS Loved the fact that the topic he was apparently inadequate at, went in to win maths highest prize. PPS You have a very soothing voice.

What an awful and ridiculous oral exam, I'm glad I didn't have to go through nonsense like to be accepted for PhD. It measured nothing other than the ability to have memorized a whole lot of stuff including proofs, which is all irrelevant to the ability to do research.

Nice video as always Toby! Haha Enjoyed this much👍👍👍

What a beautiful video. I love your ending that having a high IQ is not the most important thing, but how you nurture your creativity to accomplish great things!

You make the incomprehensible interesting. Which in turn motives further study.