Terence Tao: preference

Transcript context

…Just from a psychological element, do you have emotional or self-doubt that just overwhelms you in moments like that? Because this stuff, it feels like math is so engrossing that it can break you when you invest so much of yourself in the problem and then it turns out wrong. You could start to… A similar way chess has broken some people. Yeah, I think different mathematicians have different levels of emotional investment in what they do. I mean, I think for some people it’s as a job, you have a problem and if it doesn’t work out, you go on the next one. So the fact that you can always move on to another problem, it reduces the emotional connection. I mean, there are cases, so there are certain problems that are what are called mathematical diseases where just latch onto that one problem and they spend years and years thinking about nothing but that one problem. And maybe their career suffers and so forth, but they say, “Okay, I’ve got this big win. Once I finish this problem, it will make up for all the years of lost opportunity.” I mean, occasionally it works, but I really don’t recommend it for people without the right fortitude. So I’ve never been super invested in any one problem. One thing that helps is that we don’t need to call our problems in advance. Well, when we do grant proposals, we say we will study this set of problems, but even though we don’t promise, definitely by five years I will supply a proof of all these things. You promise to make some progress or discover some interesting phenomena. And maybe you don’t solve the problem, but you find some related problem that you can say something new about and that’s a much more feasible task. But I’m sure for you, there’s problems like this. You have made so much progress towards the hardest problems in the history of mathematics. So is there a problem that just haunts you? It sits there in the dark corners, twin prime conjecture, Riemann hypothesis, Goldbach’s conjecture?…

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