PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

4. THE RISE AND FALL OF CREATIVITY
CONTEMPORARY GENIUSES
Having gone this far, I could not resist venturing some forecasts on the
careers of celebrated contemporary personalities who are still producing
creatively. I considered three Nobel-prize winners—two physicists and a
writers—and a celebrated movie director.
Burton Richter won the 1976 Nobel prize in physics and later director
of the Stanford Linear Accelerator. He provided me with a complete
list of his scientific publications. Carlo Rubbia is winner of the 1986
Nobel prize in physics and later director of the European research laboratory
CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The data on his scientific
publications come from the Physics Abstracts (London: the Institute of
Electrical Engineers). Gabriel Garcia Marquez received the Nobel prize
in literature in 1982. I found his novels catalogued in the library of Columbia
University. The career of Frederico Fellini, the noted Italian
filmmaker, is well documented. To compile a complete list of Fellini’s
full-length features I consulted three different Who’s Who publications.
For all four cases I fitted an S-curve on the cumulative number of
works and established the level of the ceiling. The procedure yielded
dates for the 1 percent and the 90 percent levels. The former indicated
the moment of conception of the individual’s career; the latter pointed
to the time before which the work can be considered largely incomplete
and it would be unlikely the person would die. The table below summarizes
the findings.
Name Ceiling Year of 1% Year of 90% Born
Richter 340 1954 1991 1931
Rubbia 240 1948 1994 1934
Marquez 54 1964 1994 1928
Fellini 24 1920 2003 1920
We see that the two physicists had comparable careers. They both
started young and achieved rough completion of their work at age sixty.
Marquez “became” a writer at the age of thirty-six and would continue
writing books at least up to age sixty-six. But Fellini broke the record. It
seems that he had at least three more movies to make, the third one at
the age of eighty-three.
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