This TED Talk features entrepreneur Lux, Na Ryan, recorded live at TED NYC 2017.

Joseph Keller used to jog around the Stanford campus,

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

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

Being a mathematician, he set out to understand why.

Professor Keller was curious about many things, why teapots dribble, or how earthworms wriggle.

Till a few months ago, I hadn't heard of Joseph Keller. I read about him in the New York Times, in the obituaries.

The Times had half a page of editorial dedicated to him, which you can imagine is premium space for a newspaper of their stature.

I read the obituaries almost every day.

My wife, understandably, thinks I'm rather morbid to begin my day with scrambled eggs and a, let's see who died today.

But if you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news and cues man's

failures. An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper in the obituaries.

In my day job, I run a company that focuses on future insights that marketers can derive from past data, a kind of rear-view mirror analysis.

And we began to think, what if we held a rear-view mirror to obituaries from the New York Times?

Were there lessons on how you could get your obituary featured, even if you aren't around to enjoy it?

Would this go better with scrambled eggs?

And so, we looked at the data.

2,000 editorial non-paid obituaries over a 20-month period between 2015 and 2016.

What did these 2,000 deaths, rather lives, teach us?

Well, first we looked at words.

This here is an obituary headline.

This one is of the amazing Lee Kuan Yew.

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