The real relationship between your age and

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were all in their 20s and early 30s when they did so. And it's 
not only him. It's not only observational bias, because there's 
actually a whole field of genius research that has documented 
the fact that, if we look at the people we admire from the 
past and then look at what age they made their biggest 
contribution, whether that's music, whether that's 
science, whether that's engineering, most of them tend to do 
so in their 20s, 30s, early 40s at most. But there's a problem 
with this genius research. Well, first of all, it created the 
impression to us that creativity equals youth, which is painful, 
right?
08:45
(Laughter)
08:47
And it also has an observational bias, because it only looks at 
geniuses and doesn't look at ordinary scientists and doesn't 
look at all of us and ask, is it really true that creativity vanishes 
as we age? So that's exactly what we tried to do, and this is 
important for that to actually have references.
09:07
So let's look at an ordinary scientist like myself, and let's look 
at my career. So what you see here is all the papers that I've 
published from my very first paper, in 1989; I was still in 
Romania when I did so, till kind of this year. And vertically, you 
see the impact of the paper, that is, how many citations, how 
many other papers have been written that cited that work. And 
when you look at that, you see that my career has roughly 
three different stages. I had the first 10 years where I had to 
work a lot and I don't achieve much. No one seems to care 
about what I do, right? There's hardly any impact.
09:42
(Laughter)
09:44
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That time, I was doing material science, and then I kind of 
discovered for myself networks and then started publishing in 
networks. And that led from one high-impact paper to the 
other one. And it really felt good. That was that stage of my 
career.
09:58
(Laughter)
10:00
So the question is, what happens right now? And we don't 
know, because there hasn't been enough time passed yet to 
actually figure out how much impact those papers will get; it 
takes time to acquire. Well, when you look at the data, it seems 
to be that Einstein, the genius research, is right, and I'm at that 
stage of my career.
10:17
(Laughter)
10:20
So we said, OK, let's figure out how does this really 
happen, first in science. And in order not to have the selection 
bias, to look only at geniuses, we ended up reconstructing the 
career of every single scientist from 1900 till today and finding 
for all scientists what was their personal best, whether they got 
the Nobel Prize or they never did, or no one knows what they 
did, even their personal best. And that's what you see in this 
slide. Each line is a career, and when you have a light blue dot 
on the top of that career, it says that was their personal 
best. And the question is, when did they actually make their 
biggest discovery? To quantify that, we look at what's the 
probability that you make your biggest discovery, let's say, 
one, two, three or 10 years into your career? We're not looking 
at real age. We're looking at what we call "academic age." Your 
academic age starts when you publish your first papers. I 
know some of you are still babies.
11:18
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