It was traditional to not actually cash the prizes that Erdos did award while he was alive. People usually framed the cheque instead.
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.
I think one nice thing about mathematics is that we don't really have one prize that dominates all the others, like the Nobel prizes.
Can you make fancy patterns of water that actually have some computation power? I'm betting that fluids are complex enough to do this.
If there is something that I should know how to do but don't, it bugs me. I feel like I have to sit down and work out exactly what the problem is.
It is very humbling to receive the Fields Medal. The words of a Fields Medallist carry a lot of weight within mathematics - for instance, in framing future directions of research - which means that I have to watch what I say more carefully now!
In 1992, when I was 16, I moved to the United States to start working on my Ph.D. at Princeton University in New Jersey.
For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others.
When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quieten me down.
I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.
Math education has changed over the years. In the 19th century, they taught spherical trigonometry because one of the biggest applications of mathematics was navigating the ocean. This is no longer so relevant.