Stephen Wolfram’s Daily Routine, According To Decades Of Data

Sometimes a visualization is extraordinary not for its graphics, but for the exhaustive data it’s built on. Stephen Wolfram—the creator of the Mathematica software package and the computational search engine Wolfram Alpha—has records of his habits going back to the mid-1980s. In 2012, he analyzed that data to produce this picture of his typical day, built up over decades. His phone calls correlate strongly with meeting times, a visual trace of his life as telecommuter. The data also render clearly his habits as a night owl, with a flurry of keystrokes after midnight, trailing off around 2 a.m.

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This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of Popular Science, under the title, “Dawn of the Data Age.”

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