Terence Tao: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. So we should say a twin prime conjecture, one of the biggest problems in the history of mathematics. Goldbach conjecture also. They feel like next-door neighbors. Has there been days when you felt you saw the path? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you try something and it works super well. You again, get the sense of mathematical smell we talked about earlier. You learn from experience when things are going too well because there are certain difficulties that you sort of have to encounter. I think the way of colleague might put it is that if you are on the streets of New York and you’re put in a blindfold and you’re put in a car and after some hours the blindfold is off and then you’re in Beijing. I mean that was too easy somehow. There was no ocean being crossed. Even if you don’t know exactly what was done, you’re suspecting that something wasn’t right. But is that still in the back of your head? Do you return to the prime numbers every once in a while to see?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.