If you ask someone, "How do you envision a genius scientist?" most people will probably imagine an old man with gray hair. But how close to reality is that image?
I decided to make a list of the 100 most famous scientists and inventors in history and determine how old they were when they made their greatest invention/discovery.
Obviously there is no way to put a precise number on how "great" someone's contribution was, so if someone decides to make their list, it may end up being somewhat different from mine. Anyway, once we have the people, we need to find out 2 things: when this person was born and when did he make his greatest contribution to science.
The first one is easy. The second can be tricky, especially for people like Leonhard Euler, Galileo Galilei, Srinivasa Ramanujan, or Augustin-Louis Cauchy, who have made an enormous amount of contributions, sometimes even in different fields of science. So some of my estimates are debatable. Nonetheless, the final numbers at the end of this article should remain more or less the same even if I change some estimates.
The full list can be found here. I admit, I was quite sloppy when writing down contributions.
I won't go over every single person on the list since that would take too long, so let's use Einstein as an example and then get to the main point of this article. Einstein developed the theory of special relativity in 1905 and the theory of general relativity in 1915. Averaging the two gives us 1910. Einstein was born in 1879, which means he was 31 years old in 1910.
Here's what the distribution of ages at the time of the greatest discovery looks like:
Mean: 38 years.
Median: 39 years.
99% percentile: 57 years.
Overall, I am somewhat surprised by the results. I was expecting that ages will be concentrated in a narrow range, for example, 20-30.
According to cognitive scientists, there are two types of intelligence: fluid and crystallized, which is just a fancy was of saying "how good someone is at reasoning" and "how much information they know". And the way these two types of intelligence change as we age is not the same:
Fluid intelligence peaks around 20, while crystallized intelligence either stagnates or keeps growing (for example, if that person uses spaced repetition 😉) but doesn't decline in the absence of neurodegenerative diseases.
Intuitively, I expect that fluid intelligence matters a lot more than crystallized when it comes to inventing/discovering something new, which is why I said that I was expecting ages to fall within the 20-30 range. Perhaps the relationship between the fluid intelligence and making a great discovery is more tenuous than I thought. Or perhaps crystallized intelligence plays a more significant role than I think.