The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019

From 2017: "Dr John Goodenough’s story suggests some people become more creative with age"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/opinion/sunday/to-be-a-ge...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14058696

I have noticed this phenomenon myself a lot. If you're in science, look at the Wikipedia pages of people who are today big names in your field and I can almost guarantee you'll find somebody even more famous as their PhD supervisor.

I think it's things like "rock stars" get to pick the best students, those students having good role models, having it easier to land a position when your thesis advisor is some bigwig, but also that science has been expanding exponentially so a much larger fraction of the oldies were bigwigs who did big discoveries in their fields.

(my own thesis advisor shared an office with Josephson back in the day (Josephson junctions, which led to SQUIDS, NMR/MRI). That was before Josephson got the Nobel, as IIRC the youngest physics laureate ever, and before he went mad and started peddling Uri Geller style mind-over-matter claptrap.)

I have enormous admiration for those who know they have more to contribute and just keep pushing, rather than retiring.

[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/professor-john-goodenough...