Monday, May 03, 2004
Math
I tell a similar story about how studying Math works so it was interesting to see an independent corroborating view:
And yet: There's Perelman, pushing 40, and Andrew Wiles, 41 at the time of the final resolution of Fermat's Last Theorem. Today one doesn't find mathematicians who revolutionize their field—even once—before the age of 22.
What's changed? For one thing, there's simply much more mathematics to learn than there was 100 years ago. The undergraduate curriculum at Princeton brings students to the state of the art in research—as it was around the time of Poincaré's death in 1912. A year of backbreaking work in graduate school suffices to turn the clock forward to 1950 or so. At the age when a contemporary student first opens a current research journal, Galois had already been dead for two years
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