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Is Math a Young Man's Game?

Posted by michael on from the women-not-invited dept.

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."

4 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Andrew Wile by Andrast · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Also worked on the proof for Fermat's theorem for 7 years in secret(which in the mathematics community is a rather odd thing to do). He was dreaming of solving it while he was still a child. There is quite a good book on the subject for anyone with any level of knowledge called fermats last theorem. I'd give you a link but i'm tired..

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    Why me?
  2. Re:New field vs. old fields by spyderbyte23 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A century ago, mathematics was primarily a new field.
    More precisely, there were many new fields within mathematics to explore. However, there was already quite a large body of existing knowledge. It's just that it was about as much as a sophomore engineering student knows(give or take).

    Now, as the article says, you are a graduate student -- and probably not a new graduate student -- before you're even looking at other people's cutting-edge work, let alone doing your own.

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    -- Support Ometz le-Serev.
  3. Life expectancy by glgraca · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Could it be because not so long ago
    people usually didnt live
    beyond 40?

  4. competing with discoveries from the past by e**(i+pi)-1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When visiting mathtutor one can see that even 200 years ago, many important discoveries were done in the later stages of the Mathematicians career. Stories like the ones about Abel or Galois distort the picture.

    More and more discoveries of younger mathematicians are achieved through collaboration or by standing on the shoulders of people with more experience (who tend also to be more generous with sharing their ideas without expecting credit).

    Mathematical knowledge continues to accumulate in a fast pace and only few of this knowledge has been absorbed in books. Chances grow that a young mathematician will discover something already known or to be a special case of a much more general result. Fortunately, there are better and better online databases but it also needs more and more time to dig through that material.

    The most productive age for a mathematician will grow also in the future. The same will happen in physics or computer science (as a previous post has pointed out already).