"I can't think of anyone that I'd want to permanently trade places with (in the sense of actually becoming them), but there are a lot of people I'd like to be for a day. Most of the people on my list would be friends and relatives, but I'd also include some strangers. Once such person is Terence Tao. Terence won the gold medal at the International Math Olympiad at age 13, the youngest winner ever. He got his PhD from Princeton at 20. He has won the Clay Research Award, a MacArthur Genius Award, and the Fields Medal (math's equivalent of the Nobel Prize). With technical brilliance and deep insight, he solves problems others consider intractable, problems the human brain wasn't designed to solve. (Quick example: He and Ben Green proved that there are an infinite number of arbitrarily long strings of prime numbers that are a constant distance apart.) And he's only 29, so his biggest breakthroughs are yet to come. But my reason for selecting him isn't simply because he's one of the smartest people on the planet. He has privileged access to a type of knowledge about our world that few others have. It has often been said that God is a mathematician. Of course, it's usually mathematicians who are saying this; I suppose engineers say God is an engineer, artists say God is an artist, etc. But math does seem to offer a window into an aspect of reality we don't usually see, one that's fundamental, beautiful, and timeless. I admire those who can genuinely appreciate the secrets it holds, and I especially admire those who can unlock these secrets."