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Joseph Keller used to jog
around the Stamford campus.

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And he was struck by all the women
jogging there as well.

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Why did their ponytails swing
from side to side like that?

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Being a mathematician,

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he set out to understand why.

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(Laughter)

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Professor Keller was curious
about many things.

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Why teapots dribble,

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or how earthworms wriggle.

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Until a few months ago,

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I hadn't heard of Joseph Keller.

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I read about him in the New York Times

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in the obituaries.

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The Times had half a page
of editorial dedicated to him,

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which you can imagine is premium space
for a newspaper of their stature.

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I read the obituaries almost every day.

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My wife understandably thinks
I'm rather morbid

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to begin my day with scrambled eggs
and "Let's see who died today."

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(Laughter)

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But if you think about,

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the front page of the newspaper
is usually bad news.

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And [....] man's failures.

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An instance where bad news
[...] accomplishment

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is that the end of the paper,

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in the obituaries.

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In my day job,

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I run a company that focuses
on future insights

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that marketers can derive from past data.

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A kind of rearview mirror analysis.

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And we began to think,

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what if we held a rearview mirror
to obituaries from The New York Times?

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Were there lessons on how
you could get your obituary featured?

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Even if you aren't around to enjoy it?

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(Laughter)

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What does go better with scrambled eggs?

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(Laughter)

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And so we looked at the data.

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2,000 editorial nonpaid obituaries
over 20-month period

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between 2015 and 2016.

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What did these 2,000 deaths,

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rather, lives,

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teach us?

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Well, first we looked at words.

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This here is an obituary headline.

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This one is the amazing Lee Kuan Yew.

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If you remove the beginning and the end,

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you're left with the beautifully
worded descriptor,

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that tries to,

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in just a few words,

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capture an achievement of a lifetime.

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Just looking at these is fascinating.

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Here are a few famous ones --

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people who died in the last two years.

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Try and guess who they are.

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[An Artist who Defied Genre]

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That's Prince.

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[Titan of Boxing and the 20th Century]

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Oh, yes.

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[Muhammed Ali]

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[Groundbreaking Architect]

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Zaha Haddid.

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So we took these descriptors

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and did what's called natural
language processing,

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where you feed these into a program,

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it throws out the superfluous words --

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"the" and "and,"

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the kind of words you can mime
easily in "Charades," --

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and leaves you with the most
significant words.

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And we did it not just for these four,

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but for all 2,000 descriptors.

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And this is what it looks like.

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Film, theatre, music,
dance and of course art

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are huge.

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Over 40 percent.

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You have to wonder why
in so many societies

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we insist that art gets pr