The Secret Lives of Numbers

"Golan Levin is Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also holds Courtesy Appointments in the School of Computer Science, the School of Design, and the Entertainment Technology Center. Martin Wattenberg's work centers on the theme of making the invisible visible. Jonathan Feinberg is a musician and computer programmer. Jonathan 'JD' Feinberg, 'The Doctor of Sound,' was They Might Be Giants' first touring drummer. Dr. David Elashoff is a Professor of Medicine and Biostatistics at UCLA and Director of the Department of Medicine Statistics Core.

The authors conducted an exhaustive empirical study in order to determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million. The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect our culture, our minds, and our bodies. We surmise that our dataset is a numeric snaphot of the collective consciousness; herein we return our analyses to the public in the form of an interactive visualization, whose aim is to provoke awareness of one's own numeric manifestations. " -- From Turbulence