Douglas Southall Freeman wrote the definitive biography of Robert E Lee over twenty years, publishing it when he was 49; he then went on to publish his seven volume biography on George Washington when he was 62 (he finished the sixth volume on the day he died; the seventh was completed by his research assistants).
I think this is pretty common across different creative forms albeit with different age ranges but constrained at the higher end.
So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.
Literature (esp novels) seems to occupy an older range, perhaps 30s to 50s. Perhaps classical music and philosophy also? I don't know about the visual arts.
I interpret it as the former requiring the creative fireworks of youthful neural elasticity and the latter the depth we associate with lived experience and wisdom.
Naturally there are outliers (general relativity in Einstein's early 30s, Shakespeare word play till his late 40s) but I think in general these rules of thumb seem to be a good guide for the very highest achievers and for the most creative periods for us mere mortals.
I think a lot is driven by environmental rather than genetic factors. For instance the article mentions that both The Road, and No Country for Old Men were written when Cormack was in his 70s. But very few people in their 70s are even trying to write, let alone get published.
I think there's something similar in chess where players tend to peak around their mid to late 30s. But a major issue there is that that's also the age that most players are having children and developing ever more interests. And they're competing against the younger generation which is still dedicating 100% of their life, and time, to chess. Absent some monumental edge, that's a battle you're going to inevitably lose - even if aging factors did not exist.
The best works of Bach and Beethoven are from later in their life, although neither lived to be 85 (65 and 57, respectively), and also wrote great works in their younger years. Bruckner kept improving with age. There are also composers who lost it at a later age: Ravel, famously. Classical music is difficult, so experience does allow a better overall view, something which a lot of short works (such as pop songs) don't need.
Ravel wrote his most famous work, Bolero, after age 50, and suffered a traumatic head injury a few years later. Not a good example, except perhaps that the odds of bad things happening increase with longevity.
> So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.
I can, just from feeling, agree to the pop music. About math I would cite the example of Gilbert Strang, who made many books at advanced age, including one at age 86 or other publications well over the 70s. Another example (well not math, but CS) Donald Knuth. I do not know how is the whole statistic, but writing good books, even text books, does not seem to be teenager thing.
I think pop musicians are capable of doing greater works later, but the perception of pop works are so heavily influenced by the image/presentation of the artist that we view the works as lesser. I don't think there is something fundamentally different about pop music that leads to best works being earlier relative to other genres of music beyond that.
On the bright side, most of us were never candidates for inventing relativity, really. I wonder if our mediocrity remains stable, of if we lose a proportional amount of capability as the luminaries did.
Yeah there are quite a few exceptions to this. I've been (re-)reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and two of the four people directly involved in the discovery and explanation of nuclear fission were 60 (Hahn and Meitner) the other two (Frisch and Strassman) were in their mid-to-late 30s. Shortly after, Bohr (53) figured out that the oddities of uranium's fission behavior were due to the different activation energies of U-235 and U-238.
I think the best place to look for major works late in life is probably historical writing, which calls for accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Looking at the four most recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize in history from 2023-2025 [0], all appear to be north of 50 based on their Wikipedia pages (which give dates of education if not dates of birth), and one is in her 70s [1].
Popularity is an indicator of a quality (appeal). If the author intends to write something with wide appeal and succeeds, they're probably good at their job. Now something can be popular and read by many people without necessarily appealing to them, but that's another story.
What is important to keep in mind is that works of literature have more than one quality, and even "great" works exceed at often just a few, while being mediocre on other axis. Many are considered great merely for being first or having an outsized influence on works that came after, even though later works improved on it and did the same thing better!
This is a disappointing statistical modelling technique.
The author asked LLMs to produce lists of data which are readily available on the likes of wikipedia. Author date of birth, list of publications, and publication release date are all fairly easy to get hold of. They just need formatted appropriately. The LLMs produced a few false positives, and missed out some prominent works.
I get that this is just the author working in public & writing about what they're up to, but the number of avoidable errors introduced by the methodology make reading it a poor use of time.
> In trying to come up with some good examples I asked LLMs. (…)
> So I tried to cast the net more broadly and asked LLMs (…)
> EDIT: also hunted down several mistakes, as one would expect from LLMs; thanks to commenters.
This is a slop post. You can’t trust any of the data. It’s baffling and worrying the author apparently understands mistakes from LLMs are to be expected but still decided to publish without doing due diligence.
You're pushing back against openly using LLMs to assist in research for writing articles.
In my opinion the effect of your pushback is nudging people to not disclose their use of LLMs. I'm not sure that's what you want.
In other words, if every time someone says "I used an LLM to assist me with this article" they get backslash, these people will not stop using LLMs. They'll stop telling that they did.
"Source: I made it up" was a meme meant to be deployed in conversations between children online. And now we're seeing the phrase deployed sincerely and almost verbatim in the annals of the most prestigious institutions of thought.
This is actually a good fit for a Wikidata SPARQL query you can run here https://query.wikidata.org/:
Douglas Southall Freeman wrote the definitive biography of Robert E Lee over twenty years, publishing it when he was 49; he then went on to publish his seven volume biography on George Washington when he was 62 (he finished the sixth volume on the day he died; the seventh was completed by his research assistants).
I think this is pretty common across different creative forms albeit with different age ranges but constrained at the higher end.
So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.
Literature (esp novels) seems to occupy an older range, perhaps 30s to 50s. Perhaps classical music and philosophy also? I don't know about the visual arts.
I interpret it as the former requiring the creative fireworks of youthful neural elasticity and the latter the depth we associate with lived experience and wisdom.
Naturally there are outliers (general relativity in Einstein's early 30s, Shakespeare word play till his late 40s) but I think in general these rules of thumb seem to be a good guide for the very highest achievers and for the most creative periods for us mere mortals.
Mediocrity of course is unconstrained by age.
I think a lot is driven by environmental rather than genetic factors. For instance the article mentions that both The Road, and No Country for Old Men were written when Cormack was in his 70s. But very few people in their 70s are even trying to write, let alone get published.
I think there's something similar in chess where players tend to peak around their mid to late 30s. But a major issue there is that that's also the age that most players are having children and developing ever more interests. And they're competing against the younger generation which is still dedicating 100% of their life, and time, to chess. Absent some monumental edge, that's a battle you're going to inevitably lose - even if aging factors did not exist.
The best works of Bach and Beethoven are from later in their life, although neither lived to be 85 (65 and 57, respectively), and also wrote great works in their younger years. Bruckner kept improving with age. There are also composers who lost it at a later age: Ravel, famously. Classical music is difficult, so experience does allow a better overall view, something which a lot of short works (such as pop songs) don't need.
Ravel wrote his most famous work, Bolero, after age 50, and suffered a traumatic head injury a few years later. Not a good example, except perhaps that the odds of bad things happening increase with longevity.
> So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.
I can, just from feeling, agree to the pop music. About math I would cite the example of Gilbert Strang, who made many books at advanced age, including one at age 86 or other publications well over the 70s. Another example (well not math, but CS) Donald Knuth. I do not know how is the whole statistic, but writing good books, even text books, does not seem to be teenager thing.
I think pop musicians are capable of doing greater works later, but the perception of pop works are so heavily influenced by the image/presentation of the artist that we view the works as lesser. I don't think there is something fundamentally different about pop music that leads to best works being earlier relative to other genres of music beyond that.
On the bright side, most of us were never candidates for inventing relativity, really. I wonder if our mediocrity remains stable, of if we lose a proportional amount of capability as the luminaries did.
I'll have you know my mediocrity is directly proportional to my age.
Probably sigmoids
Yeah there are quite a few exceptions to this. I've been (re-)reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and two of the four people directly involved in the discovery and explanation of nuclear fission were 60 (Hahn and Meitner) the other two (Frisch and Strassman) were in their mid-to-late 30s. Shortly after, Bohr (53) figured out that the oddities of uranium's fission behavior were due to the different activation energies of U-235 and U-238.
I think the best place to look for major works late in life is probably historical writing, which calls for accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Looking at the four most recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize in history from 2023-2025 [0], all appear to be north of 50 based on their Wikipedia pages (which give dates of education if not dates of birth), and one is in her 70s [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_History [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Jones
Major=got popular enough? That doesn't need to be fully correlated to the quality of the work.
Popularity is an indicator of a quality (appeal). If the author intends to write something with wide appeal and succeeds, they're probably good at their job. Now something can be popular and read by many people without necessarily appealing to them, but that's another story.
What is important to keep in mind is that works of literature have more than one quality, and even "great" works exceed at often just a few, while being mediocre on other axis. Many are considered great merely for being first or having an outsized influence on works that came after, even though later works improved on it and did the same thing better!
Right. And "written" isn't the best way to describe these, rather they are "published" after so-and-so.
John Milton was 63 when Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published.
This is a disappointing statistical modelling technique.
The author asked LLMs to produce lists of data which are readily available on the likes of wikipedia. Author date of birth, list of publications, and publication release date are all fairly easy to get hold of. They just need formatted appropriately. The LLMs produced a few false positives, and missed out some prominent works.
I get that this is just the author working in public & writing about what they're up to, but the number of avoidable errors introduced by the methodology make reading it a poor use of time.
> In trying to come up with some good examples I asked LLMs. (…)
> So I tried to cast the net more broadly and asked LLMs (…)
> EDIT: also hunted down several mistakes, as one would expect from LLMs; thanks to commenters.
This is a slop post. You can’t trust any of the data. It’s baffling and worrying the author apparently understands mistakes from LLMs are to be expected but still decided to publish without doing due diligence.
You're pushing back against openly using LLMs to assist in research for writing articles.
In my opinion the effect of your pushback is nudging people to not disclose their use of LLMs. I'm not sure that's what you want.
In other words, if every time someone says "I used an LLM to assist me with this article" they get backslash, these people will not stop using LLMs. They'll stop telling that they did.
"Source: I made it up" was a meme meant to be deployed in conversations between children online. And now we're seeing the phrase deployed sincerely and almost verbatim in the annals of the most prestigious institutions of thought.
Things seem a bit more dire now.