<p>The discussion about people who “change the world” is not really appropriate for applying statistics. Obviously, if you include celebrities (e.g. actors, entertainers) and athletes, youth would rule. In academia or technology, while there are some young standouts (particularly in computer and web-based companies, because the filed is relatively young), in my experience in engineering many of the most productve engineers have come from the World War II generation, in which they went to war before beginning college. The class of 1950 was a huge college graduating class of male engineers (under the GI bill), including my grad school advisor at MIT. </p>
<p>I have not known that many people who truly had a major impact on the world. One was Sam Wu (<a href=“http://www.ur.umich.edu/9293/Nov02_92/8.htm)%5B/url%5D”>http://www.ur.umich.edu/9293/Nov02_92/8.htm)</a>, whom I met while I was also a faculty member at Michigan. Sam finished college and then under China’s “cultural revolution” worked on railroads for 9 years before coming to the US in the 1950’s and THEN (at about age 30) began his undergraduate and graduate studies in mechanical engineering at Wisconsin. Although he started his formal engineering education very late, he produced 113 PhD students during his career and it has been estimated that about 1/4 of all manufacturing engineering faculty in the US were either his students or students of his former PhD students. This is just one example, but world changers have many different backgrounds. Not all, like Gauss or Mozart, are child prodigies or even begin their success at a young age.</p>
LOL. What athlete has “changed the world”? I think that because we cannot operationally define what a “world changer” is, we cannot easily measure it. Personally, I wouldn’t put Ghandi or MLK in the same class as Brangelina (who are working to clean up NOLA). And I suspect many of us have people in our fields who we think have made a significant impact on others. By the way pafather, your link doesn’t seem to work.</p>
<p>I’d add, for parents of kids who are faced with young kids of high ability (who may not be “off the chart” but are bored with school) that shopping for an appropriate “gifted” program (high ability, gifted & talented, and other names may apply) may be worth the effort. Some such programs, even in public school systems, offer flexible learning options that let kids advance at their own pace in different areas. This gives the the opportunity to move ahead rapidly but stay in a group with peers who are not only the same age but who often share similar interests. That won’t work for a six year old who’s sequencing genes, but might be a great choice for a kid who’s a year or two ahead of his classmates in one or more areas.</p>
<p>The research on eminent people coming from the upper class and next the lower class and both of those classes having far higher representation than per size of the population than the middle class came from the book “Creativity” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996, pages 171-172). He studied 91 eminent people who were alive between 1990 and 1995 and found that about 30% of them came from the lower-class (parents were farmers, poor immigrants, or blue-collar workers) and only about <em>10%</em> came from middle-class families (where the USA had what percentage of middle-class citizens from this era? Sure was higher than 10% by a large margin, but I don’t have an exact figure here). A majority of about 34% had fathers who held an intellectual occupation such as professor, writer, orchestra conductor (I wonder if the study included our son’s mentor, as his father was one of those), or research scientist. The remaining quarter had fathers who were lawyers, physicians, or wealthy businessmen. He only notes that these proportions are way off from the frequency of such jobs in society as a whole rather than actual percentages of society who falls into each group, but I agree that 25-26% falling into that last set seems very high and also the 34% occupations.</p>
<p>The very rich have ways to nurture their children that middle-classand lower-class people don’t and <em>connections</em> to get their children internships, etc. while the very poor (like my mother, who was the first female to graduate from the National War College and was a rare female with a graduate degree in math in her era and also was the first female GS-17 and SES member at the Pentagon back in the days when probably no other female reported to the Secretary of Defense and the President but instead most had secretarial jobs) have high levels of motivation to work hard and “never suffer again” (the one prized possession my mother had was a Shirley Temple doll she bought as an adult as her parents never had enough money to buy it for her; she could have bought herself a closet of mink coats, but that dolls was what she really wanted and she would never let me touch it as it was so cherished by her). The middle-class, meanwhile, generally don’t feel any need to be able to afford country clubs with sky high entry fees as they didn’t have them as children or sky high priced cars as they didn’t grow up with them (though there are exceptions - I grew up with a family owning cars lusted after by others and yet have never had an interest in very expensive cars) and such and so lack both the drive to “finally not have to worry about not being able to afford what most can” and the drive to “keep up with the Trumps” and so are content to be everyday Janes and Joes (like my husband and I are).</p>
<p>Hope this answered your questions. If not, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.</p>
<p>Again, most eminent people were not child prodigies. However, the <em>percentage</em> of child prodigies becoming eminent is larger than the <em>percentage</em> of the general population who becomes eminent or even of the <em>college educated</em> population (and my <em>guess</em> would be even for the top schools like Harvard, MIT, Yale, etc. but for that, I am not as sure). And this is for academia and technology, not just sports and such. Stephen Wolfram is an eminent technologist and he graduated from Caltech with a doctorate at age 20 and was considered a child prodigy. Charles Fefferman ([Charles</a> Fefferman](<a href=“Math @ Bellevue College”>Math @ Bellevue College)) started college at age 12, graduated with high honors from the University of Maryland at age 17, and at 20 he earned his Ph.D. from Princeton. At 22 the newly bearded “Charlie” became a full professor at the University of Chicago (the youngest full professor in America even to this day, I believe). By the time he was 24, he completed the work that earned him a Fields Medal (awarded every 4 years to a mathematician under 40) and a host of other honors. Erik Demaine was home-schooled by his father from age 7 to 12, when he entered Dalhousie University in his hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. He earned his bachelor’s degree two years later in 1995 at age 14, then went to the University of Waterloo for his master’s degree in math (1996) at age 15 and earned the Ph.D. (2001) at age 20. He joined the MIT faculty that same year (age 20), reportedly the youngest professor in the history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003, he has was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.</p>
<p>Nobel prize winners aren’t mostly child prodigies, but again, the <em>percentage</em> of child prodigies who go on to win one is far higher than the <em>percentage</em> of non-child prodigies who win one. And truly, how is this even surprising to some people as clearly the child prodigies have greater than average talent and so one should expect they would have greater than average career success?</p>