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Comment by nagrom | Hacker News Reader

The background story of Évariste Galois is phenomenal. He was expelled from school twice, fought in a revolutionary unit, was imprisoned for threatening the life of the king and revolutionised mathematics forever. He died in a duel over a woman at the age of 20! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Évariste_Galois

Imagine what he would have done if he had lived to 40? There were some really fascinating characters in the mathematics in the 19th century. A very far stretch from the world's stereotypes of a repressed, bespectacled geek or the boring image of mathematics given by high school classes.

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Genius and Biographers: The Fictionalization of Evariste Galois by Tony Rothman http://www.physics.princeton.edu/~trothman/galois.html

"This article is an attempt to sift some of the facts of Galois's life from the embroidery. It will not be an entirely complete account and will assume the reader is familiar with the story, presumably through Bell's version. Because these authors have emphasized the end of Galois's life, I will do so here. As will become apparent, many of the statements just cited are at at worst nonsensical, or at best have no basis in the known facts."

> Imagine what he would have done if he had lived to 40?

Sorry, can't. Marriage alone is a major productivity killer, then there are also kids and general life problems. There was a study that basically built a histogram of mathematicians' (?) productivity vs age. The peak was around 25 years old, followed by a very steep decline.

Marriage alone is a major productivity killer, then there are also kids and general life problems.

Leonhard Euler managed to be a productive mathematician for decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler

He had children and grandchildren, and that didn't stop him from working on mathematics even in their presence. Blindness didn't stop him either.

Sure, but that's a sample of one.

The "rock stars" of mathematics are all mostly romanticized youth, but its bedrock is mostly gray-matter tucked under grayer hair.

Bela Bollobas, Tim Gowers, Ron Graham, John H Conway, Elwyn Berlekamp, Richard Guy, Reinhard Diestel, Alan Baker.

The problem is that you only hear about the truly eccentric. Ordinary people who are also extraordinary mathematicians never get romanticised, so you won't have heard of them. I've just picked a few there from my own personal acquaintance.

There's been a little interesting work that suggests that there are different archetypes among the extremely creative that roughly correspond to 'early peakers' and 'late peakers'.

I just skimmed this wired article but it seems like a good summary (note the '06 date though)

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html

Perhaps 'early' and 'late' are not as important as the fact that there is a peak - people don't seem to be famous/productive in a sustained way. The 'early' and 'late' is probably continuous, you can peak anytime, but you tend not to hold it.

Leonhard Euler:

Born: 1707

completes masters in philosophy: 1723

lost vision in right eye: 1735 Solved 7 bridges problem: 1736

publish Introductio in analysin infinitorum, volume 1: 1748 [2]

Euler-Bernoulli Beam Theory: 1750 Euler's Formula (geometry): 1750 [1]

publish Institutiones calculi differentialis: 1755 [2]

near total blindness: 1766

publish Theoria motuum lunae: 1768

[1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/junkyard/euler/ [2] http://eulerarchive.maa.org/historica/euler-timeline.html

There's plenty more that's left out. After his near-total blindness, he averaged publishing one mathematical paper per week in 1775. To assume you or I are like Euler is hubris. To assume otherwise is doing a disservice to humanity.

That was formerly true in other sciences as well, but things have been changing: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/News_Articles/2011/scien...

I don't know if mathematics has been following the same trend.

Imagine how many geniuses of Galois' caliber have come and gone in the last 2 centuries but never had a chance to make a significant contribution to the world due to being discouraged or oppressed by a suffocating school system or a dysfunctional family life that drove them onto a different track.

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