Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- When I was a child in Adelaide, Australia, I loved games with clear, unambiguous rules; puzzles that were tough but fair; and the clean, abstract, simplicity of numbers and symbols. So it is perhaps not surprising that I have been drawn to mathematics for as long as I can remember. For much of my childhood, playing with mathematical problems, equations and facts was one of my favorite activities; I even went so far as to compete in international high school mathematics competitions, racing to solve tricky sets of problems in a few hours. I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols, but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.
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When he was a boy in Australia, Terence Tao says, he loved games, puzzles, math problems
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Once he realized that math could answer questions about the world, he was hooked, he says
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At 16 he came to U.S. to study for Ph.D; split life between U.S. and Australia; married in U.S.
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Tao: I'm husband, dad, citizen of both countries now, but my identity is as a mathematician
By 2002, I was married to an American -- we were married in the United States -- and last year I became a U.S. citizen (while retaining @placeholder citizenship).