[mcartyem]

The word innovator might be ill-suited to support the argument that mastery generally takes time.

For example physicists and mathematicians do their best work in their early twenties. Arguably they get worse with age.

[SatvikBeri]

I was curious as to whether this was true, so to test it out, I looked at Hilbert's Problems[0], which are widely considered some of the most important problems in Mathematics in the 20th century. Of the solvers whose ages I could find on Wikipedia, the median age was 30.5 and the mean was 29.4. (For Hilbert's 10th problem the solution is listed as the joint work of 4 people. I treated them as one person with an average age of 42.5)

This obviously isn't statistically significant, but it lends some weight to the myth that Mathematicians "die young."

[mcartyem]

This is great research, thank you.

[Evbn]

You see the effect in math because math requires the sharpest most complex pure thinking. Other major creative efforts (business, movies) involve collaboration and social/organizational structures that benefit from years of relationship-building and reputation-building. Or years of drudgery, if your innovation is something like the world's first dictionary.