4 ms·
Mean ages of first/best contribution to various fields
- ojbyrne 18y agoThe narrative suggests another reason for the "legend." He wrote a manuscript spelling them out when he was 20, the night before he was killed in a duel. A Norwegian mathematician and contemporary of Galois's named Niels H. Abel died of tuberculosis at age 26 after solving a 300-year-old problem and discovering what are now known as Abelian functions. Life expectancy has increased dramatically in the last century, so results from before that would be skewed young.
- jacoblyles 18y agoWhy does the legend persist in mathematics more than other fields?
- zitterbewegung 18y agoMathematicians want to live fast and die young? There is another legend that there is no nobel prize in mathematics because Gosta Mittag-Leffler cheated on nobel's wife even though its probably not true. See http://almaz.com/nobel/why_no_math.html http://almaz.com/nobel/why_no_math.html
- callahad 18y agoI wish the article proper had treated fields other than mathematics. (Though that won't keep me from exclaiming: Woohoo! Go Geology! I still have a chance!)
- markessien 18y agoI just spent 10 minutes trying to think up a joke that combined research in geology, a rock and a hard place. I couldn't think of any, geology is such a dry subject.
- pasbesoin 18y agoI tried to make something out of Toe, but the acronym I was trying to remember (THAI) doesn't really work. Nonetheless, an interesting, newer process for extracting bitumen from tar sands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_sands#Toe_to_Heel_Air_Injection_.28THAI.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_sands#Toe_to_Heel_Air_Injec...
- teej 18y agoI have a feeling that the Field's Medal requirements help drive down the age for Mathematicians a lot more than the article gives it credit.
- mhartl 18y agoI talked with David Goodstein at Caltech once about the youth legend in physics. His basic view was that people took two data points---Newton and Einstein---and over-extrapolated. He pointed to Feynman (among others) who continued to make major contributions throughout their careers. Of course, a couple counterexamples isn't enough to disprove a trend, but it does seem like the legend is build on a rather flimsy foundation. N.B. I found myself quite enjoying the writing in this article, and I realized that the author was a colleague of mine from college. Lila Guterman was a writer for the Harvard Science Review when I was its editor-in-chief. I particularly recall a bang-up article she wrote on naked mole rats. Glad to see she's keeping up the good work!