“You start getting famous for being famous,” Dr. Tao said. “The Paris Hilton effect.”

Not that any of that has noticeably affected him. His campus office is adorned with a poster of “Ranma ½,” a Japanese comic book. As he walks the halls of the math building, he might be wearing an Adidas sweatshirt, blue jeans and scruffy sneakers, looking much like one of his graduate students. He said he did not know how he would spend the MacArthur money, though he mentioned the mortgage on the house that he and his wife, Laura, an engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, bought last year.

After a childhood in Adelaide, Australia, and graduate school at Princeton, Dr. Tao has settled into sunny Southern California.

“I love it a lot,” he said. But not necessarily for what the area offers.

“It’s sort of the absence of things I like,” he said. No snow to shovel, for instance.

A deluge of media attention following his Fields Medal last summer has slowed to a trickle, and Dr. Tao said he was happy that his fame might be fleeting so that he could again concentrate on math.

One area of his research — compressed sensing — could have real-world use. Digital cameras use millions of sensors to record an image, and then a computer chip in the camera compresses the data.

“Compressed sensing is a different strategy,” Dr. Tao said. “You also compress the data, but you try to do it in a very dumb way, one that doesn’t require much computer power at the sensor end.”

Image Terence Tao, 31, is one of the worlds top mathematicians. Credit... Monica Almeida/The New York Times

With Emmanuel Candès, a professor of applied and computational mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Tao showed that even if most of the information were immediately discarded, the use of powerful algorithms could still reconstruct the original image.