Notes

The conventional wisdom is that you're past it before you're even in your thirties, especially in fields like mathematics and music, famous for child prodigies

I refuse to believe it. Just because Einstein discovered photons, declared that e = mc² and laid the foundations of relativity in his mid-twenties, it doesn't mean I won't succeed in similarly revolutionising physics at a somewhat riper age. I admit that I'm making slow progress, but I'm hoping to have cracked it by the time I'm in my mid-seventies.

To test the conventional wisdom, I took ten of the greatest achievers of all time in a variety of different fields, and plotted how old they were at the times of their greatest achievements; move your mouse over each of the portraits for the details. I've also shown the average age for each field.

The results vary considerably. Athletes really are past it by the time they're into their mid-twenties. Architects, on the other hand, are still doing work into their late sixties that surpasses anything they've done in their younger years.

Perhaps most surprising is that physicists and mathematicians don't do their greatest work until they're well into their thirties, on average. Einstein's early papers might have shaken science to its foundation, but his General Theory of Relativity, surely the crowning accomplishment of physics to date, didn't come until later, when he was 36.

A word of caution. By plotting only the greatest achievements of all time, I've skewed the results in favour of youth. The greatest achievements are often revolutionary, and revolutionaries tend to be young. When it comes to the less radical work done by the rest of us, I suspect that we continue to surpass ourselves to a much greater age.

Even so, there are lessons to be learned from this chart. Perhaps it's time for me to let go of my dream of scoring the winning goal at the World Cup final, and concentrate instead on writing my seminal work of literature.