Toby on Terence Tao

The guy is just implausibly smart! And he's a Math professor at UCLA, ...

Here she looks at a few of the books he read aged 8 or thereabout.

The introduction to that book on logic reminded me of Lewis Carroll's The Game of Logic which was published in 1886, and contains these verses in the frontispiece:

 To my Child-friend.

I charm in vain; for never again,
All keenly as my glance I bend,
   Will Memory, goddess coy,
   Embody for my joy
Departed days, nor let me gaze
   On thee, my fairy friend!

Yet could thy face, in mystic grace,
A moment smile on me, 'twould send
   Far-darting rays of light
   From Heaven athwart the night,
By which to read in very deed
   Thy spirit, sweetest friend!

So may the stream of Life's long dream
Flow gently onward to its end,
   With many a floweret gay,
   Adown its willowy way:
May no sigh vex, no care perplex,
   My loving little friend!

I was several years older than Terence Tao is now when I discovered that book for the first time, ... In the preface is the quote from The Dunciad by Alexander Pope:

"There foam'd rebellious Logic, gagg'd and bound."

The verse in which it appears is this, from Book IV.1:

    Beneath her footstool, Science groans in Chains
    And Wit dreads Exile, Penalties, and Pains.
    There foam'd rebellious Logic, gagged and bound,
    There, stript, fair Rhetoric languished on the ground;

    His blunted Arms by Sophistry are borne, 

See Toby on Math In Alice in Wonderland and Gigi Young on "Alice in Wonderland".

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