Terrence Tao will be more famous than Lebron James
In the year 1812 and in the Bohemian spa town of Teplitz, two artistic giants of the 19th century, the great German writer Goethe and the great German composer Beethoven, spent a week together, taking walks every day along the boulevard discussing art and culture and history.
The story goes that one day they were walking when they encountered the Austrian Imperial court proceeding by – the emperor with his key advisors.
Goethe moved aside and removed his cap in respect. Beethoven entirely ignored the whole proceeding.
Goethe is alleged to have turned to Beethoven and said “Do you know who these men are?” And Beethoven’s reply (paraphrased) was “Yes, I know who they are but I am Beethoven and you are Goethe and in one hundred years people will still know our names while these men will be as unknown as the beggar over there.”
Beethoven was of course right.
Goethe and Beethoven are famous to this day while the powerful men of the 1812 Austrian Empire despite presiding over the Napoleonic Wars and other great historical events of their time are entirely forgotten – (can you name any of the Austrian ministers of 1812?).
Who ultimately gets remembered?
We live in a world where basketball star Lebron James has more Twitter followers than all the leading intellects combined.
But does that mean that Lebron will be famous in the distant future?
The answer is likely no.
There are people who walk among us relatively unknown who in the near and deep future will be immensely more famous and relevant to humans of that future than Lebron James.
If I had to guess, Terrence Tao with less than 1000 Twitter followers will be one of them.
Let me explain…
To understand long term fame, you have to understand long term memory.
Think back to a job where you went to an office every day and sat at the same desk and performed the same tasks.
What exactly do you remember about this job?
The vast majority of your day consisted of repeatable tasks. You got coffee and you wrote emails etc. When you think back on say writing an email, you likely have no memory of writing a specific email or when you wrote it, you just have a blurred memory of the fact that you wrote a lot of emails at that job.
Your brain like a computer needs to try to function efficiently. It would be pointless to remember the experience of writing every single email that you wrote. So instead, your brain auto-erases the specific details of everything that is similar and remembers it as a blurred thing.
You still have specific memories but they tend to be sharp deviations from that norm. Like if one day a guy walked into the office naked carrying a gun - your brain would distinctly remember when that happened and how it happened.
For instance, we all remember where we were and what we were doing when 9/11 happened.
So back to historical memory.
We don’t remember the richest or most powerful guy of early 19th century Austria because there were a lot of versions of that guy. It was a form of repeatable memory in a historical sense.
Now sometimes the top guy in a niche is exceedingly dominant like say Michael Jordan in the game of basketball. His exceeding dominance allowed him to be exceedingly famous (he was arguably the most famous man in the world in the 1990s).
But then someone else will come along who will be just as dominant – in this case Lebron James.
Each new exceedingly dominant NBA player in the years that follow will diminish Michael Jordan fame’s – just as he diminished the fame of those before him.
And just as Lebron diminishes Jordan, future basketball players will diminish Lebron.
Longer term fame comes not from dominating something but re-inventing it or changing the direction of it - being in other words an enormous deviation from the norm.
Jackie Robinson was not remotely dominant, but he changed the arc of athletic participation in this country. He will likely end up being remembered longer than any other professional American athlete for the simple fact that the color barrier can only be broken once.
The same goes for political figures.
Julius Caesar was a politician like other politicians and a rich man like other rich men and a great soldier like other great soldiers, but he changed the arc of the historical world by ending the Roman Republic. You could only end the Roman Republic once which is why you can name Caesar but probably not any of the 70 Roman Emperors who were just as rich and powerful who followed.
So we remember change – not continuity.
Now on some level all the things we imagine as striking change will seem less striking as we venture deeper into our future.
So who will be remembered in the deeper future – say 2000 years from now?
It might be a silly question to ask – after all humans may not be around. But let us assume they are.
They presumably won’t care about the great athletes or musicians of the present (just as we don’t remember the best runners or actors of Ancient Greece today as heralded as they were in their time). The one thing that they will still presumably care about will be knowledge – specifically math and science.
The Pythagorean theory will not stop being true in 2,000 years and in 2,000 years, humans will still respect and acknowledge Pythagoras for coming up with it – just as every high school freshman does today.
The most famous people in the deeper future will be the advancers of human knowledge, specifically scientists and more specifically mathematicians.
Why mathematicians?
Math is the purest form of human knowledge.
Once a mathematical theorem is proved – it becomes immutable. If you create mathematical theorems you are essentially building a block of human knowledge that can never go away (the same cannot be totally said for even a science as pure as physics – Newton’s theories of gravity were overturned by Einstein etc.)
A human from the deep future who comes to our present-day reality will not be star struck meeting Lebron James, they would be star struck to meet Terence Tao.
You probably do not know who Terence Tao is – few people do – but let me take a moment to explain him.
Like Lebron, Tao was a child prodigy and like Lebron, Tao lived up to his hype.
Over the last twenty odd years, Tao has written over 400 research papers and published dozens of books and won the Field’s Medal Winner, which is given out every four years to the best mathematicians in the world - here is a clip from Good Will Hunting explaining it.
He has made extra-ordinary contributions to partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, analytic number theory, nonstandard analysis, quantum theory and numerous other subfields. He is the guy other mathematicians go to in order to have their problems answered. (If you want to keep up with Tao and his work and see what a proof looks like – you can check out his blog here.)
While we could go on describing the incredible importance Tao carries in the world of math – it is more interesting to ask why the man who is arguably the best at doing what he does – endowing humanity with irrefutable knowledge – is not nearly as famous as a guy who throws a ball into a hoop?
The answer is that the vast majority of us (myself included) are too intellectually limited to understand the beauty of what Tao is doing – on the other hand our simple minds can easily grasp the beauty of a Lebron dunk.
These theorems appear to us incredibly remote and irrelevant to our day-to-day life.
Who cares if someone comes up with a new way to describe large prime numbers?
However, the notion that this stuff is irrelevant is again an illusion created by our own stupidity. Math even the most esoteric math always find its way into human applications if you give it enough time.
Again take prime number theory, which is an area that Tao has contributed greatly to with his Green-Tao theorem. Discovering large prime numbers might seem like a silly parlor game. However, the reality is that our ability to send encrypted messages to one another is built on the multiplication of large prime numbers (see here) and forcing computer algorithms to untangle them. Tao’s contributions to prime number theory will increasingly underlay the entire security of the Internet.
Tao’s theorems on compression has allowed for a whole new subfield called compressed sensing that uses algorithms to create high resolution data from low resolution information samples. This has innumerable applications and could make computing overall much faster (see here for an explanation as to how it works) and greatly increase our ability to measure and sense things. This could revolutionize innumerable fields from how we measure our own physical health to how we measure the environment around us.
Lebron might someday go down as the greatest basketball player who ever lived. But human beings in the year 4000 AD will simply not give a shit.
If they traveled back in time to our present, they would likely rather meet a man with less than 1000 Twitter followers today.