Tao

From the Washington Post: Terence Tao is often called the “Mozart of Math.” A child prodigy born in Australia, Tao, 50, is now at the top of his field at the University of California at [sic] Los Angeles, working in the rarefied realms of partial differential equations or harmonic analysis on problems so hard it may take a PhD to understand them. But for the past few weeks, he’s been preoccupied with more run-of-the-mill pecuniary concerns: fundraising.

Being one of the world’s greatest mathematicians didn’t protect Tao from losing his National Science Foundation grant in late July, when the Trump administration froze about half a billion dollars in federal research funding after accusing UCLA of mishandling antisemitism and bias on campus.

A court order restored National Science Foundation grants, including Tao’s. But no new awards can be made, putting at risk the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where he is director of special projects...

Math and politics don’t often intersect, but Tao is speaking out about how upheavals, delays and uncertainty in federal funding imperil the unique American ecosystem for science. He spoke to The Post about the events of the last few weeks, the appeal of doing research in the United States and why math matters. This interviewed has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Q: What happened to your current grant?

A: I got an email from a journalist from the Bulwark. He first told me that my grant had been suspended and … then he also mentioned casually that the IPAM, the math institute here also got defunded. And that’s a grant that’s 40 times bigger than my own. And much, much more serious. Suddenly, we didn’t have the operating funds to run for three months.

Because of previous delays in funding, I didn’t have enough money to fund my own summer salary. I was already delaying that for one month. And so, yeah, it’s still delayed, but that’s fine. I can take it. But IPAM, they didn’t have the reserves to operate for more than a few months. So basically, for the past two weeks or so, we’ve been in an emergency fundraising mode. I’ve been meeting with lots of donors...

Q: A lot of people that I’ve been speaking to, researchers in different fields, have said that they’ll be okay because they’re more senior. But they’ve expressed a lot of concern about early career researchers and scientists.

A: The NSF grant that I had, I mean its primary purpose was to support my graduate students, give them the opportunity to travel to a conference, which is really important for career development at that stage, to buy them out of teaching for one quarter so that they can work on research. And, you know, at that career level, having a paycheck for $3,000 really makes a difference...

Q: Do you have a sense of optimism or would you ever consider leaving the U.S.?

A: I’ve had a very positive experience at the U.S. for 30 odd years … It offers so many things that are definitely not perfect, but you feel like things can happen here, really good things... The things that you took for granted, there was bipartisan support to keep certain things in the U.S. running as they have been more or less for the past 70 years because the system worked. That’s not a safe assumption anymore.

Full interview at https://washingtonpost.com/science/2025/09/07/science-math-trump-federal-cuts-grants.