> The answer may be related to the early age at which mathematicians seem to peak. I may have been searching badly, but I couldn't really find anything to supp

> The answer may be related to the early age at which mathematicians seem to peak. I may have been searching badly, but I couldn't really find anything to support this idea, at least in terms of a cognitive deficit. The following was the best discussion about mathematicians and age that I found: http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~limchuwe/articles/youth.html http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~limchuwe/articles/youth.html Bullet points: - Mean age of best contribution by mathematicians is 38.8 (based on counting references to research by historians and biographers). This is roughly the same for other SET researchers. - The Fields Medal cannot be awarded to mathematicians over the age of 40, which skews the mean age of mathematicians receiving their field's most prestigious award. - As mathematicians get older, they take on more administrative work, have families, etc., which reduces the time and energy they have to devote to research. (I'm reminded of how Andrew Wiles basically shut out the world while proving Fermat's Last Theorem.) - Rapid expansion of the field meant an increasing proportion of mathematicians were young, thus more discoveries were by young people. - Math is a field where someone can make a great contribution without having acquired a large body of knowledge. - Young math prodigies get a disproportionate share of attention.