Math is a field where old mathematicians may not die, but aren't solving many new theorems either. They're writing text books.

In other fields, age doesn't matter, or can be an asset. Experience sometimes counts more than unschooled talent. You can write a great novel at any age, or make a killing in business.

Pure late bloomers are hard to find. Chances are that the older debut author, for example, has been writing all along, just unpublished. Even though I published my first book at age 62, it doesn't mean I haven't been writing.

All these caveats aside, in no particular order, the envelops please. I've organized the awards into different areas of achievement:

Harlan David Sanders. Colonel Sanders founded the Kentucky Fried Chicken company at 65, and went on to become a multimillionaire. Everyone knows what "Visiting the Colonel" signifies. The business concept was brand new for him as an older person, but he had been cooking for most of his life. As a young man, he worked in a variety of jobs that had nothing to do with cooking--farmer, steamboat pilot, and insurance salesman. When he hit forty, he opened a service station and starting selling chicken dinners to his customers--developing his pressure frying method over a number of years. Eventually, he opened a popular restaurant. If they hadn't built Interstate 75, which took the traffic away from his business, he might have remained a local legend only. But he knew how to make lemonade out of lemons (if not lemon chicken), and started the franchise business, which we know and some love today.

Grandma Moses. Anna Mary Robertson Moses was a happy, long-time embroiderer until arthritis made that painful and difficult. Instead of the needles, she took up the paint brush at the age of 75, in 1935. Untrained, but in the firm American tradition of primitive art, her paintings were discovered in a drugstore window a la Lana Turner by a prominent collector in 1938, and a New York gallery show led to world-wide fame. Louis Bromfield, Pulitzer Prize winning author, compared her work to that of Peter Bruegel. She continued painting until close to her death in 1961, age 101. Although she started out selling her paintings for $2 or $3, depending on size, in 2006--one of her 3,600 paintings, Sugaring Off (1943)--sold for $1.2 million. Runner-ups in this art category are Bill Traylor, a former slave who started painting at age 83, and none other than Paul Cezanne who would have been only a footnote in art history as a minor impressionist had he not lived long enough to produce his signature late-life still-life inspirations for the cubism of Picasso and Braque.

Abraham and Sarah. As they say in horse racing, I'm putting these two in as a coupled entry. Unlike the rebellious Jesus, a Mozartian prodigy in the field of religion, the founder of the Jewish and Islamic religions was minding his own business in Ur of the Chaldees when God spoke to the 75 year old man then known as Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you." This involved a move with his barren wife Sarai, age 65, and a number of other relatives including Lot, to Canaan, and the rest, as they say, was biblical history. At age 99, when Sarai was 90, she gave birth to Isaac, sometime after Abram's servant Hagar gave birth to Ishmael, the father of Islam. Isaac's birth lead to a new covenant with God including circumcision and name changes for the parents to Abraham and Sarah. Isaac goes on to become the second patriarch of Judaism, followed by his son Jacob. Sarah dies at 127, and Abraham at 175. Taken literally, this story leads to the conclusion that they don't make men or women like they used to. Symbolically, it is prototypical of the idea that age and wisdom go together. In traditional societies, the authority of elders is greatly respected, perhaps because there are so few of them.

Clara Peller. She was bumping along at age 80 as a manicurist who had raised two children as a single mother, when she was hired to ply her trade for a commercial shot in a barbershop. The Dancer Fitzgerald ad agency noticed her feisty manners and remarkable voice, and hired her as an actress. In 1984, at age 81, she made her iconic debut in a Wendy's commercial. Looking at a competitor's big bun with a small burger, she loudly asked, "Where's the beef?" Clara and her catch phrase appeared in many wildly popular incarnations, and her question became the signature slogan of the ill-fated Walter Mondale campaign for the presidency in 1984 against Reagan. Although her career was short-lived--she died in 1987--Peller lived long enough to be in a few movies, make an appearance on Wrestlemania, and get into show business controversy when she was dropped by Wendy's after making a commercial for Prego, saying she found the beef in their spaghetti sauce. After they dumped her, Wendy's sales went into the dumpster until they called upon another old person Dave Thomas, Wendy's founder, to do their commercials. In his role as a commercial actor, Thomas was another late bloomer at 57, and this followed his association as a consultant with Colonel Sanders. He designed the revolving chicken bucket before founding Wendy's at 37.

Harry Bernstein. He published a short story when he was only 24, in 1934, but it was not until he was 96 that his well-received debut novel, The Invisible Wall--based on his hard scrabble childhood in England, before his family emigrated to the U.S.--was published by Random House. In the interim between his short story and novel, Bernstein kept his hand in as a writer for trade publications. After his wife of 67 years died, a return to fiction and memories of his childhood was therapy for his loss and loneliness. He's still growing strong having published two more books since his debut. Bernstein exemplifies the idea that an old dog can indeed learn new tricks, and that in some cases the moment might not be pregnant until ancient age. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, "If I had not lived until I was 90, I would not have been able to write this book. It just could not have been done even when I was 10 years younger. I wasn't ready. God knows what other potentials lurk in other people, if we could only keep them alive well into their 90s."