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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."
When you get married and have some kids it is real hard do get any work done..
"Okay Dear I'll mow the lawn now"
I also suspect the growing complexity of screensavers as a factor..
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..
Why me?
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.
OK, now what?
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.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
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.
An architect, a physicist and a mathematician were asked whether they could imagine a 4-dimensional space.
The architect said: "That's impossible! I can't draw that!"
The physicist said: "Well, that can be done, if we say that time is the fourth dimension..."
The mathematician said: "Let us imagine an n-dimensional space. Now, let n equal four..."
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
A single example is not a proof
EXACTLY!!!
The proof comes from the side of the bottle. You should tip the bartender more the higher the proof.
I'm going to hell for that one...
Could it be because not so long ago
people usually didnt live
beyond 40?
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).