abel

Happy are those who expect nothing

No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. _ Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; _ [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. _ A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.

I wonder what God must have thought then / When He saw the work of Cain's hand / That the first baby born on the planet / Grew up to kill the third man.