As a consequence of its syntax, Whitespace source code can be contained within the whitespace of code written in a language that ignores whitespace – making the text a polyglot.

There is a 15 state Turing machine that halts if and only if a conjecture by Paul Erdős (closely related to the Collatz conjecture) is false. Hence if BB(15) was known, and this machine did not stop in that number of steps, it would be known to run forever and hence no counterexamples exist (which proves the conjecture true). This is a completely impractical way to settle the conjecture; instead it is used to suggest that BB(15) will be very hard to compute, at least as difficult as settling this Collatz-like conjecture.

An example of a galactic algorithm is the fastest known way to multiply two numbers,[3] which is based on a 1729-dimensional Fourier transform.[4] It needs O ( n log ⁡ n ) {\displaystyle O(n\log n)} bit operations, but as the constants hidden by the big O notation are large, it is never used in practice. However, it also shows why galactic algorithms may still be useful. The authors state: "we are hopeful that with further refinements, the algorithm might become practical for numbers with merely billions or trillions of digits."[4]

Childhood A child prodigy,[20] Terence Tao skipped 6 grades.[21][22] Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only three children in the history of the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just eight years old; Tao scored a 760.[23] Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, stated that Tao had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching.[6][24] Tao was the youngest participant to date in the International Mathematical Olympiad, first competing at the age of ten; in 1986, 1987, and 1988, he won a bronze, silver, and gold medal, respectively. Tao remains the youngest winner of each of the three medals in the Olympiad's history, having won the gold medal at the age of 13 in 1988.[25]