... it can often be profitable to try a technique on a problem even if you know in advance that it cannot possibly solve the problem completely.
Terence TaoEducation is a complex, multifaceted, and painstaking process, and being gifted does not make this less so.
Terence TaoUnsolicited surprise requests from strangers are essentially guaranteed to be met with a negative response.
Terence TaoAt a purely formal level, one could call probability theory the study of measure spaces with total measure one, but that would be like calling number theory the study of strings of digits which terminate.
Terence Tao