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."

Comments

Whose game? And who said it was a game?

[mactov]

Definitely this is the women-not-invited dept., as billed, but it reminds me of a conversation I had with a 98 year old woman in 1982. I was 28, had a toddler and an infant, and was very much afraid that motherhood would be the end of any other kind of creative work for me. (The exhaustion factor alone was daunting.)

Miss Mae said to me, in a Miss-Daisy sort of Southern accent, "Honey, women are not like men -- we get better with age. After all, you can't think straight until your parts settle. I promise, when you are 45, you'll know what you want to do with yourself, and it won't have anything to do with diapers."

She was right about women, or about me, at any rate. I'm 48 and in my first year of professional school while the "baby" is at his first year of college. (What this has to do with my "parts" I am less sure.)

What I notice is that my younger colleagues are quick and bright, but that what I lack in speed I make up in context. And all of us are passionate about what we are doing, but the flavor is a little different depending on age. When we are working well together, the combination of gifts is truly wonderful. Perhaps instead of framing the "game" (of math or of anything else) as a contest, we ought to be looking at ways to make progress that makes use of both the experience of age and the quickness of youth.

Re:New field vs. old fields

[Omkar]

Hmm, so the Greeks, Euler, Descartes, and thousands of other mathematicians don't count? Math is one of the oldest fields I can think of.