>See also the recent rise of machine learning - many of the top contributors to that field were not doing machine learning research 10 years ago.
Machine learning is older than you think.
Machine learning is older than you think.
There are also people who were doing machine learning 30 years ago and are still doing so. But there are people who were doing, say, fluid dynamics simulations 10 years ago who self-taught machine learning, and are now making significant contributions to machine learning, by transferring their knowledge of programming, optimization, calculus, etc.