Depends on the surface area of unbroken ground. I understand there are quite a few marginal areas in mathematics where you can come up with novel approaches that will be quite impressive to the other five people working on that specific sub-sub-sub-area, but not necessarily that much to mathematics at large. Also, contemporary mathematicians whose names are actually recognizable by popular science literate non-mathematicians are a very small group even compared to the sort of top researchers who are working with the sort stuff the apocryphal wisdom about needing to be in your 20s seems to apply to.
Though I’d also like to see more arguments about how above 30 mathematicians can do all sorts of useful stuff when you don’t get fixated on paradigm-upending world-class results, and what sort of stuff this is.
Depends on the surface area of unbroken ground. I understand there are quite a few marginal areas in mathematics where you can come up with novel approaches that will be quite impressive to the other five people working on that specific sub-sub-sub-area, but not necessarily that much to mathematics at large. Also, contemporary mathematicians whose names are actually recognizable by popular science literate non-mathematicians are a very small group even compared to the sort of top researchers who are working with the sort stuff the apocryphal wisdom about needing to be in your 20s seems to apply to.
Though I’d also like to see more arguments about how above 30 mathematicians can do all sorts of useful stuff when you don’t get fixated on paradigm-upending world-class results, and what sort of stuff this is.