Terry Tao’s first paper: “Perfect numbers”

Terry Tao has just been awarded the inaugural Riemann prize, and as a result I discovered he had his first mathematics paper published at age 8, in a (now defunct) journal for school mathematics in my home state of South Australia. Since this rare item only appears available reproduced as an appendix in a scanned pdf of a 1984 article in an education journal, I thought I’d re-typeset it. So here it is:

Terence Tao, Perfect numbers, Trigon (School Mathematics Journal of the Mathematical Association of South Australia) 21 (3), Nov. 1983, p. 7–8. (pdf)

Note that this appeared 13 years before his earliest listed paper in Math Reviews/MathSciNet.

Edit: I made a GitHub repository for the paper, the LaTeX source, and the code (working, after minor edits) from it. I passed it on to Tao already.

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