[neworder]

I absolutely love the ending:

"After this, they decided to pass me, though they said that my harmonic analysis was far from satisfactory. :("

especially when compared to the Fields Medal citation, where Tao is awarded the medal "for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory".

Seems he did learn a bit of harmonic analysis in the meantime.

[a3_nm]

... or that this sort of exams don't measure correctly the ability to get Fields medals.

[tomrod]

I find this true in many PhD fields (and their relative measures of success)