Every time you enter a password or buy something online or send any kind of encrypted WhatsApp message,

you're betting your security on a pattern in prime numbers.

A pattern no mathematician on Earth has ever been able to prove.

There are the atoms of multiplication.

They're supposed to be random, unpredictable.

And our entire digital security infrastructure assumes that they are.

But here's the thing.

We don't actually know that.

We've tested it with supercomputers on trillions of cases, but mathematical proof, it's still elusive. Today, the man sitting across from me has solved more legendary math problems than almost any human alive. Terence Tao won the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of Math, and he's tackled questions that have stumped the greatest minds for centuries. And he just told me there could be an undiscovered pattern hiding in prime numbers,

a pattern that, if it exists, could break the encryption protecting every financial transaction you'll ever do.

We're going to talk about the beauty of numbers, why AI keeps getting the math wrong,

what it was like to meet the legendary Paul Erdush as a 10-year-old and whether or not mathematics is invented or discovered.

Let's go deep into the impossible with the Mozart of Math.

First question I always ask a mathematician is, how do you like your coffee?

I actually don't drink coffee much except in social occasions, actually. Black, no sugar.

Okay. So the reason I asked that, maybe you'll recognize as Erdos, I believe, said, what did you say about mathematicians and coffee?

He said that mathematicians are a means for turning coffee to theorems.

There's a very nerdy follow-up joke to that, which is that a co-mathetician is a way of turning co-theums into fee.

Into feet.

Yeah.

It's a very inside joke. That's right. That's a dad joke plus a mathematician joke. That's really good at the same time. Well, the reason I bring up Erdosh, of course, you actually met him when you were a kid, didn't you? Yes, I think I was 10 at the time. So he had a collaborator in Adelaide, which is the city where I grew up, George Sagerash, so he would visit every now and then. At the time, I think one of the math professors at the local university introduced me to him. And Erditch was always very good at, he was known for meeting bright young kids. And so we had a nice conversation. I wish I had remembered more of it, actually. I was too young at the time to realize just sort of how much of an honor was really. The one thing I remember was that he really treated me like an equal. Like, you know, he didn't, so condensen as a kid. And he later sent me a postcard that, uh, it just had, well, thank you for your nice hospitality. here's a math problem, which I didn't solve, actually, but it did get so played it by someone else. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, he was one of the most prolific mathematicians in at least modern history, maybe in all-time history. And famously, there's a relationship between the number of authors you have to go through before you're related to him, right? What is your Erdash number? Yeah, so there's this concept called the Erdush number. So Erdish worked a lot in graph theory, and so this concept is inspired by graph theory. So Erdisch himself has an Erdish number of zero. If you've written a paper with Erdish, you get an Urdish number of one. If you've written a paper if someone who's written a paper of Urdish, you have a version number two. So I have an

Uridian number two, for instance. And I think nowadays people, it's common of Urish numbers of 4 or 5. People have made similar numbers in other fields as a Bacon number. So if you've starred in a film of Kevin Bacon, you have a Kevin Bacon number of 1 and so forth. And then there's something called the Erdish Bacon number, which is the sum of your Urdish number and Bacon number, which is usually infinite, because you either don't have a chain of papers going to Urdish or you don't have a chain of movies going to Bacon. But there are a half-dozen people who have, like, the combined number like seven or eight. Yes, yes. I've heard of random things like that. But yeah, he was known in many ways. I remember hearing from

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