Examples of top academics who weren't prodigies I'm looking for examples of people who are at the very top of their fields who weren't child prodigies, and followed quite a "normal" path in life (high school > college > grad school) before finding their passion in a field and then becoming a top academic at a top institution at it. We come across people like Terry Tao who had some sort of divine gift to do mathematics and was very much a child prodigy (he could do high school mathematics at the age of 8-9 and won an Olympiad gold medal at the age of 13), but I'm looking for people who achieved as much success as Tao (even a little less is fine considering that Tao is often regarded as the "best mathematician in the world", but I'm looking for someone in the same tier) without being child prodigies, or knowing what their passion was right from childhood. Examples?
Thomas Kuhn literally switched fields after completing his PhD in physics and is a modern philosopher well known for his work in the philosophy of science, particularly for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Karl Pearson, may be another example. Although he initially studied mathematics and then physics, he proceeded onto other things like law before eventually switching back to mathematics and making his big contributions (like establishing mathematical statistics). I have not been able to find anything immediately obvious to indicate he was a child prodigy.

As an ecologist, I'd hazard to guess that most famous ecologists were never child prodigies, but they almost certainly identified their passions early on in life while playing outside as children, which violates the


  before finding their passion in a field


part of your question.