At some point about halfway through the hurly-burly of pulling together our special issue on what I’d taken to calling The Data Age, senior associate editor Ryan Bradley noticed that Stephen Wolfram had created a timeline of significant milestones in the historical march of data. We thought it would be an excellent piece of contextual glue to apply to our analysis of the burgeoning power of data, well wielded, to both illuminate and influence our world. Fortunately, Wolfram agreed, and the timeline ran as connective tissue along the bottom of our magazine pages. Wolfram was at that time about to host his second annual Wolfram Data Summit in Washington, D.C., a gathering of database curators and purveyors and open-source savants to discuss how best to cultivate and process and liberate our geometrically expanding data bounty. Wolfram’s data-processing answer engine, Wolfram Alpha, is an outrageously ambitious and optimistic enterprise. It combines the algorithmic might of his own Mathematica software with brute-strength data-curation efforts to answer questions users may not even be aware they’re asking. I figured he would be an interesting person to chat with about data. via PopSci
November 3, 2011
