You've got mail ... just like Darwin and Einstein
Little did you know that you have a lot in common with Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. At
least when it comes to managing your email.
Notre Dame Professor of Physics Albert László Barabási and his colleague João Gama
Oliveira recently found that the correspondence of the famed scientists followed the same
mathematical formula Barabási earlier identified describing the pattern for email
correspondence.
When Barabási examined the length of time people took to answer email, he discovered
that typically messages are answered in bursts, with replies quickly sent to the most important
messages while other less important communications lingered, sometimes for a lengthy time
span.
The Notre Dame physicist, who is an expert on networking theory, wondered if the same
pattern, termed a heavy-tailed process, fit for all correspondence or merely email. The Einstein
and Darwin archives provided ideal raw material, since both scientists were prolific letter
writers. Darwin's collected correspondence consists of more than 14,000 sent and received
letters, while Einstein's numbers 30,000 letters.
"Einstein appears to have sent one letter per day on average and, on a few occasions,
received as many as 120 letters on the same day," Barabási says. "Most important, both made a
point of answering most of the letters they received, even if they came from school children."
The Notre Dame researcher found that both Einstein and Darwin answered about half of
their correspondence within 10 days. In some cases, however, replies were not sent for months or
even years. In a sentence familiar to anyone with a crowded email inbox, Einstein replied to one
letter writer, "In the course of eating myself through a mountain of correspondence, I find your
interesting letter from September of last year."
"Our results indicate a pattern that neither the famous nor the undistinguished can
escape," Barabási observes.
(July 2006)
