Terence Tao: the Mozart of Maths

One of the world's greatest minds is playing with a toy pony. He presses a plastic stethoscope into the soft toy's body, feigns a pony cough. "Is he sick or is he well?" he asks. "You don't know? Want a second opinion?"

Terence Tao - Terry, as he's mostly known - is sitting on a leather sofa in his Los Angeles living room, thin, bare-footed and bespectacled, talking to his three-year-old daughter, Madeleine, just home from a birthday party. It's hard to be intimidated by a man playing with a toy pony.

Yet this is a man with an intimidatingly rare and precious mind. Academics studied it with astonishment throughout his Adelaide childhood as he charged through IQ tests and International Mathematical Olympiads with unprecedented results. "Off the scale," says Miraca Gross, an authority on the education of gifted children, describing his IQ. "Terry hears mathematics and sees and smells mathematics in a way we don't."

Rare earth elements aren’t the secret weapon China thinks they are. Despite the name, rare earths just aren’t that rare

Rare earth elements aren’t the secret weapon China thinks they are
Despite the name, rare earths just aren’t that rare

By James Vincent on May 23, 2019 12:04 pm
 
Rare earth elements are described as the ‘vitamins of chemistry’ — producing powerful effects in small doses.

America’s trade war with China has been quietly escalating for years, but this week it took a turn for the disastrous. Huawei, once the rising star of China’s tech industry, has been cut off from US suppliers, leaving the company effectively stunted. China is likely to respond somehow, but with a multitude of options on the table, many in the tech industry are now considering nightmare scenarios.

Sealed with a kiss 💋