China may just want to start teaching cricket to their folks just to spite India.

do you want to take monetary bets on this? i doubt they will. the chinese don’t really care too much about india, they just want to replicate some of what the soviets and eastern bloc did in sports which can showcase their country’s new status in international events. i haven’t kept track of it but they apparently copied the old GDR’s doping path to success in some events a few years back, particularly women’s sports where there’s a great marginal return on drugs. the chinese army is involved in a lot of this too, cultivating sports leagues and even doing some match making.

My point exactly. I wonder if Desis are just better at mental endurance than physical endurance. I have seen people like Paes, Vijay Amritraj , Mirza start out matches gangbusters but wilt later on. Golf is about the only “sport” where we have world class player in the diaspora. Chess is another “”"sport”"”&#8482 I guess. Cricket doesnt count as Desis have such a major numbers advantage over the few other cricket playing countries that you are bound to find world class players. And watch out. China may just want to start teaching cricket to their folks just to spite India. Afghanis seem to be taking to cricket in the Pathan region.

Can’t make a worthwhile case for Tao? Hahaha.

Stop trolling. What is YOUR background to make such an assessment?

“Tao is like a little worm at the base of a gigantic mountain, in comparison to Von Neumann. “

You’re really a f****** troll.

Witten is far more accomplished than Tao. Number 1: Witten predicted M-theory, which is basically equivalent to someone in the 1700′s predicting the coming of quantum mechanics. Some other things Witten has done:

One of Witten’s early contributions in physics is a natural solution to the so called hierarchy problem. The Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts a particle known as Higgs Boson. Its mass however seems much lighter than what the Model predicts. Witten has shown that the mechanism of broken supersymmetry offers a natural explanation to the hierarchy problem. In supersymmetry theory, the Witten Index tells whether supersymmetry is broken or not. Witten went on to make seminal contributions in supersymmetric gauge theories. Along with Nathan Seiberg of the Institute of Advanced Studies Witten developed what is now known as Seiberg-Witten Theory which is related to Donaldson theory in mathematics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten

Furthermore, Witten pretty much single-handedly invented a new branch of mathematical physics, which taken in it’s entirety, is more valuable than the sum total of all of Tao’s papers.

If you look up Tao on Wikipedia, there’s only one accomplishment for him:

n 2004, Dr. Tao, along with Ben Green, a mathematician now at the University of Cambridge in England, solved a problem related to the Twin Prime Conjecture by looking at prime number progressions—series of numbers equally spaced. (For example, 3, 7 and 11 constitute a progression of prime numbers with a spacing of 4; the next number in the sequence, 15, is not prime.) Dr. Tao and Dr. Green proved that it is always possible to find, somewhere in the infinity of integers, a progression of prime numbers of equal spacing and any length.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao

The rest of the article talks about what a great collaborator Tao is, lol. Obviously, Tao is brilliant, but he’s nowhere near Witten. Witten is a genius – every aspect of his life bears this out – from the lack of formal training in physics to going on to becoming the leading physicist of the day – and his amazing ability to switch between mathematics and physics (not very different from Gauss and Newton), making seminal contributions to both .

I don’t think you have any idea about Von Neumann did, or you wouldn’t be comparing him to Tao. There has been no mathematician of Von Neumann’s caliber since his time; in terms of either breadth or depth. Tao is like a little worm at the base of a gigantic mountain, in comparison to Von Neumann.

“Originally Posted by genekim I just saw this thread – and for reason, my picture is in here, lol. Tao is much smarter than Witten, hands down. I’ve talked with Witten a few times and have interacted with Tao since he’s in my department. Don’t get me wrong, Witten’s very very bright, but Tao is on a whole new dimension.”

“If you want an example of a true mathematical genius, try John Von Neumann; this guy reinvented the wheel in quantum mechanics, led the foundations for game theory, and laid the foundation for computers, in addition to a host of other things. “

Your definitions are nebulous. If Neumann’s a genius and Tao is not I don’t know what’s going on. For the record, I’m a grad student in a top 10 school and have done advanced coursework in a couple of areas where Neumann contributed, so I have a pretty good sense of what he did. Tao’s breath in an era of super-specialized Math is astounding:

http://www.claymath.org/library/annual_report/ar2006/06report_tao.pdf

And I lack the cognitive horsepower to understand any of his papers in their entirety.

Anyway, I’m done with this discussion.

Michael Chang, winner of 1989 French open, the first Asian men to do that, is also ethnic Chinese. I don’t think he got any helps from PRC.

Terrence Tao is basically a learning prodigy. That means he can absorb and pick up information at a phenomenal pace. But he is not at the level of someone like Euler or Perelman. If he (Tao) ever manages to solve a Millenium Problem, then yes, he will have proven himself a genius, but this is unlikely to ever happen. If you want an example of a true mathematical genius, try John Von Neumann; this guy reinvented the wheel in quantum mechanics, led the foundations for game theory, and laid the foundation for computers, in addition to a host of other things.

The problem with your definition of “genius” is that it’s far too broad. Just because someone wins a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal does not make them a genius. There are many people with very high IQ’s, but there are very geniuses out there.

Tao doesn’t even compare to Witten:

You can talk to some profs who were at Princeton at the time and as a school its produced its share of talent (including Tao) but I don’t think the faculty has ever been blown away like they were with Witten. He (Witten) must have had one of the quickest journeys from “I want to be a physicist” to “I am the most important person in the field” in history. Since then he has a ton of important discoveries on his own, and also has done an amazing job of explaining and realizing the significance of other peoples work like his first paper on the Maldacena Conjecture. The latter imo is very unique.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/47/science-math-philosophy/greater-living-genius-terence-tao-ed-witten-663604/