Terence Tao, the first mathematics professor in UCLA historyto win the prestigious Fields Medal, is the first scholar appointed to UCLA'sJames and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Science.Jim and Carol Collins gave the College a $1 million gift to endow this chair.

While the vast majority of endowed chairs aredesignated in one particular field — such as nanosystems sciences, the Holocaust, dermatology orclinical law — the Collins Chairmay be awarded to a professor in any of the College's more than 30 departments.

Patricia O'Brien, executive dean of the College, announcedTao's selection and praised Jim and Carol Collins for their dedication andgenerosity.

"Jim and Carol Collins are visionary donors who understandthe value of flexibility in retaining and recruiting world-class faculty; thisapproach to endowing a chair reflects insightful leadership and is critical tothe College's success in retaining the world's most outstanding scholars,"O'Brien said. "They have profoundly enhanced UCLA's excellence."

"It is gratifying that our gift will help UCLA for manygenerations to come by supporting the teaching and research activities ofdistinguished faculty," said Jim Collins. "Faculty members who hold the chairwill be selected based on the College's highest priorities as determined by theexecutive dean."

Collins said he and his wife are "delighted" that Tao hasbeen appointed to the endowed chair and said Tao is "one of a kind."

Taowill present a free public colloquium on Wednesday, Jan. 17, at 4 p.m., in LaKretz Hall, Room 110, as part of the UCLA Science Faculty Research Colloquiumseries. His topic will be "Structureand Randomness in the Prime Numbers."

Jimand Carol Collins have been actively involved in UCLA for more than 50 years asstudents, volunteers and philanthropists. They met as students, when Jim was amember of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity and Carol was a member of the KappaKappa Gamma sorority.

JimCollins earned his bachelor's degree in civil engineering at UCLA in 1950. In1952, after meeting one of the fast-food pioneering McDonald brothers during atrip to San Bernardino, Collins opened his own hamburger stand — a singlerestaurant that he built into Collins Food International (now SizzlerInternational, Inc.), one of the country's major food-service chains, whichtoday has branches in the United States, Asia, Latin America and Australia.Collins is chairman emeritus and was formerly chief executive officer andchairman of the board of Sizzler International, Inc.

"UCLAwas a great experience for me as a student, and I've had a love affair withUCLA ever since," said Collins, who added that he bought Christmas gifts forhis grandchildren at the UCLA Store.

CarolCollins' involvement with UCLA began even earlier. She attended UCLA's Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School and spent all of her elementary schoolyears there. Three of the Collins' four children also attended the school, asdid a granddaughter.

Jimand Carol Collins made their first gift to UCLA in 1963. Over the years, theyhave supported scores of programs across campus with their philanthropy, whichhas included a $5 million gift to establish the JamesA. CollinsExecutive Centerin the Anderson Schooland discretionary funding for the College of Letters and Science.From 1982 to 1988, Jim Collins chaired The UCLA Campaign, which substantiallyexceeded its fund-raising goal. He also served as a member of the cabinet forCampaign UCLA, the most successful fund-raising campaign in the history ofhigher education, which generated more than $3 billion to deepen and broadenthe university's excellence in education, research, health care and communityservice. Campaign UCLA concluded on Dec. 31, 2005. Collins also serves on theUCLA Foundation Board of Governors and is a former president of the UCLA Boardof Trustees.

Jimhas received major alumni honors at UCLA, including the Edward A. DicksonAlumnus of the Year award in 1982. Jim and Carol both received the HonoraryFellow Award at the 2000 College of Letters and Scienceawards dinner. Three of their four children attended UCLA.

"It'swonderful to live close to UCLA and to attend the athletic and culturalevents," Jim Collins said.

CarolCollins has served as a board member for both Women & Philanthropy at UCLAand the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School (UES). In 1998, her $1.2million gift to UES set an individual giving record for the school, leading tothe creation of the Carol L. Collins UES Director's Chair.

Jimand Carol Collins also maintain many non-UCLA community affiliations, includingthe Los Angeles Metropolitan YMCA, the Venice Boys and Girls Club, and California StatePolytechnic University,Pomona, where they established the James and Carol Collins Center for HospitalityManagement.

Thetradition of endowing chairs to attract and retain internationally renownedscholars and recognize academic excellence dates back to 16th-century England.

TerenceTao won the Fields Medal, oftendescribed as the "Nobel Prize in mathematics," on Aug. 22, 2006, at theInternational Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid. In the 70 years the prize has beenawarded by the International Mathematical Union, only 48 researchers have everwon it.

"Terry is like Mozart; mathematics justflows out of him," said John Garnett, professor and former chair of themathematics department at UCLA. "Mathematicians with Terry's talent appear onlyonce in a generation. He's an incredible talent and probably the best mathematician in the world right now. Terrycan unravel an enormously complicated mathematical problem and reduce itto something very simple."

Christoph Thiele, UCLA professor and chair of themathematics department, said outstanding graduate students from as far as Romania and China,as well as throughout the United States, have come to UCLA for theopportunity to study with Tao.

Born andraised in Adelaide, Australia, Tao was awardedthe Fields Medal "forhis contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonicanalysis and additive number theory."

Inselecting Tao, the International Mathematical Union said: "Terence Tao is a supremeproblem-solver whose spectacular work has had an impact across severalmathematical areas. He combines sheer technical power, an other-worldlyingenuity for hitting upon new ideas, and a startlingly natural point of viewthat leaves other mathematicians wondering, 'Why didn't anyone see thatbefore?' His interests range over a wide swath of mathematics, includingharmonic analysis, nonlinear partial differential equations, andcombinatorics."

TheFields Medal is awarded every four years. Along with Tao, the 2006Fields Medal was presented to Andrei Okounkov, professor of mathematics at Princeton University, and Wendelin Werner,professor of mathematics at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay. It was alsooffered to Grigori Perelman, formerly a MillerFellow at the University of California, Berkeley,who declined it.

Tao, 31 years old, was 20 when he earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He joined UCLA's facultythat year and was promoted to full professor at age 24.

One of the branches of mathematics on which Tao focuses is atheoretical field called harmonic analysis, an advanced form of calculus thatuses equations from physics. Some of this work involves, in Garnett's words,"geometrical constructions that almost no one understands." Tao also works in a related field, nonlinearpartial differential equations, and in the entirely distinct fields ofalgebraic geometry, number theory and combinatorics — which involves counting.His research has been supported by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation andthe Clay Mathematics Institute.

Discover magazine praised Tao's research on prime numbers,conducted with Ben Green, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bristolin England,as one of the 100 most important discoveries in all of science for 2004. Anumber is prime if it is larger than one and divisible by only itself and one.The primes begin with 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and 17.

Euclidproved there are infinitely many primes. Green and Tao proved that the set ofprime numbers contains infinitely many progressions of all finite lengths. Anexample of an equally spaced progression of primes, of length three, is 3, 7,11; the largest known progression of prime numbers is length 23, with each ofthe numbers containing 16 digits. Tao and Green's discovery reveals thatsomewhere in the prime numbers there is a progression of length 100, and length1,000, and every other finite length, and that there are an infinite number ofsuch progressions in the primes.

To prove this, Tao and Green spent two years analyzing allfour proofs of a theorem named for Hungarian mathematician Endre Szemerdi.Very few mathematicians understand all four proofs, and Szemerdi's theoremdoes not apply to prime numbers.

"We took Szemerdi's theorem and goosed it so that ithandles primes," Tao said. "To do that, we borrowed from each of the fourproofs to build an extended version of Szemerdi's theorem. Every time Ben andI got stuck, there was always an idea from one of the four proofs that we couldsomehow shoehorn into our argument."

Tao is also well-known for his work on the "Kakeyaconjecture," a perplexing set of five problems in harmonic analysis. One ofTao's proofs extends more than 50 pages, in which he and two colleaguesobtained the most precise known estimate of the size of a particular geometricdimension in Euclidean space. The issue involves the most space-efficient wayto fully rotate an object in three dimensions, a question of interest totheoretical mathematicians.

"Terry is the world's expert on this set of five problemsand has been since he finished graduate school," Garnett said. "When Terry madea new estimate of how big thedimension must be, he also produced the solutions, or partial solutions, tomany other problems."

Tao and colleagues Allen Knutsonat UC Berkeley and Chris Woodward at Rutgers solved an old problem(proving a conjecture proposed by former UCLA professor Alfred Horn) for whichthey developed a method that also solved longstanding problems in algebraicgeometry – describing equations geometrically – and representation theory.

Speaking of this work, Tao said, "Other mathematicians gavethe impression that the puzzle required so much effort that it was not worthmaking the attempt — that first you have to understand this 100-page paper andthat 100-page paper before even starting. We used a different approach to solvea key missing gap."

His views about mathematics have changed over the years.

"When I was a kid, I had a romanticized notion ofmathematics, that hard problems were solved in 'Eureka' moments of inspiration," he said."With me, it's always, 'Let's try this. That gets me part of the way, or thatdoesn't work. Now let's try this. Oh, there's a little shortcut here.' You workon it long enough and you happen to make progress towards a hard problem by aback door at some point. At the end, it's usually, 'Oh, I've solved theproblem.'"

Tao concentrates on one math problem at a time but keeps acouple dozen others in the back of his mind, "hoping one day I'll figure out away to solve them."

"If there's a problem that looks like I should be able tosolve it but I can't," he said, "that gnaws at me."

In naming Tao one of "The Brilliant 10" scientists, PopularScience magazine, in their October 2006 issue, called him "Math's Great Uniter"and said that "to Tao, the traditional boundaries between differentmathematical fields don't seem to exist." The magazine described as"quintessential Tao" a breakthrough in a new field that "requires a mastery oftechniques from across the mathematical spectrum. It's this kind of ingenuitythat won Tao this year's Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize equivalent inmathematics. He's the youngest person to receive the Fields since 1986."

Tao has made major discoveries in at least five branches ofmathematics, the magazine said. The article quoted former UCLA PhysicalSciences Dean Tony Chan saying of Tao, "the senior people in these fields arescratching their heads in awe."

Tao's results on prime numbers "brought an end to amathematical search that had lasted for centuries," the magazine said. In thisresearch, Tao and co-author Green "used techniques from several fields touncover an astonishing pattern among primes" — proving that the set of primenumbers contains infinitely many progressions of all finite lengths.

Tao was named a MacArthur Fellow in September 2006. Inpresenting the award, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation said:"Terence Tao is a mathematician who has developed profound insights into a hostof difficult areas, including partial differential equations, harmonicanalysis, combinatorics, and number theory. His work is characterized bybreadth and depth, technical brilliance and profound insight, placing him asone of the outstanding mathematicians of his time."

For more on Terence Tao, see http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=7252and http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/index.html.

The James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Lettersand Science is part of UCLA's Ensuring Academic Excellence initiative, a five‑yeareffort aimed at generating $250 million in private commitments for therecruitment and retention of the very best faculty and graduate students. Theinitiative was launched in June 2004 and its goals include $100 million to fund100 new endowed chairs for faculty across campus, $100 million for fellowshipsand scholarships in the College of Letters and Science,and $50 million for fellowships and scholarships in UCLA's professionalschools.

About UCLA

California'slargest university, UCLA enrolls approximately 38,000 students per year andoffers degrees from the UCLA College of Letters and Science and 11 professionalschools in dozens of varied disciplines. UCLA consistently ranks among the topfive universities and colleges nationally in total research-and-developmentspending, receiving more than $820 million a year in competitively awardedfederal and state grants and contracts. For every $1 state taxpayers invest inUCLA, the university generates almost $9 in economic activity, resulting in anannual $6 billion economic impact on the Greater Los Angeles region. Theuniversity's health care network treats 450,000 patients per year. UCLA employsmore than 27,000 faculty and staff, has more than 350,000 living alumni and hasbeen home to five Nobel Prize recipients.

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