Terence Tao was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1975. A child prodigy, he participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad at the ages of 10, 11, and 12, winning bronze, silver, and gold medals respectively, and remains the youngest gold medalist in the competition's history. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Flinders University under Garth Gaudry, and completed his PhD in 1996 at Princeton University under Elias Stein. He joined UCLA in 1996 and has been a full professor there since 2000, where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair.

Tao works across a broad range of mathematics, including harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, arithmetic and geometric combinatorics, analytic number theory, random matrix theory, and compressed sensing. His many honors include the Salem Prize (2000), the Bôcher Memorial Prize (2002), the Clay Research Award (2003), the Fields Medal (2006), the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2006), the MacArthur Fellowship (2007), the Ostrowski Prize (2007), the Waterman Award (2008), the Nemmers Prize (2010), the King Faisal International Prize (2010), the Crafoord Prize (2012), the Royal Medal (2014), the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics (2015), the Riemann Prize (2019), the Princess of Asturias Award (2020), the Bolyai Prize (2020), and the Grande Médaille of the French Academy of Sciences (2023); in 2026 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia.

Tao is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Australian Academy of Science, and several other academies. He has served on numerous editorial boards and prize committees, including the Abel Prize and Fields Medal committees, and from 2021 to 2024 served on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.