It's been quite a month for UCLA mathematics professor Terence Tao. First, in late August, he traveled to Spain to receive a Fields Medal, considered to be the Nobel Prize in math, and its accompanying $13,400. Then this week, he won a MacArthur Foundation grant worth $500,000.

Australian born and raised, the son of a pediatrician and a former math teacher, Tao was a child prodigy. He earned his bachelor's degree at the age of 16, finished his doctorate at Princeton University at 21 and quickly joined UCLA's faculty.

A: Certainly it's true if it comes up in a casual conversation that I'm a mathematician, then the conversation turns to: "Oh, I was always bad in math." Generally, then nothing much interesting happens to the conversation. But at least there is a respect for mathematics. They realize that math underlies so many of the technologies that make a lot of prosperity of this country now, from the banking system to the Internet....