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Is Math a Young Man's Game?
Bamafan77 writes "Slate has an interesting article on the relationship between the productivity of mathematicians and age. The conventional belief is that most significant mathematical leaps are all made before the age of 30. However, the author gives pretty compelling reasons for why this once may have been true, but is definitely not the rule now. Two of his more interesting pieces of evidence include Grigori Perelman's (probable) proof of the Poincare Conjecture at 40 and Andrew Wile's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem at 41."
Check it out over at Simon Singh's website. Fermat's Last Theorem is great reading, not to mention The Code Book if you fancy cryptography, technology or just drama.
You neglect the contributions of the Arabic and Indian mathematicians at your peril. There's a reason they call them "Arabic numerals," and the word "algebra" comes from the Latin mistransliteration of the Arabic mathematician who first wrote a dicourse on it.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
No way, dude. The original poster who said "A century ago, mathematics was primarily a new field" was way off base, and the follow up isn't any closer. Sophmore engineering students are pretty amazing, I know -- check out those concrete canoes! -- but their math curriculum encompasses about one percent of the math available a century ago.
The last person who might possibly have mastered the whole of mathematics as it existed in his era was Henri Poincare'. Incidentally, he did much of his most memorable work just about 100 years ago. The suggestion that today's undergrads might have a comprehension comparable to his, is just silly.