The March 28, 2011 issue of Forbes magazine featured an interview with billionaire Yuri Milner. I start with a quotation from the article (which I link at the end of this blog post):
Milner loses all reticence when he talks about the future of social media. He says we live in the “age of the mathematician,” in which inordinate power and riches will go to the people who create the algorithms that end up dictating who and what we know.
“The Billionaire who Friended the Web”, Forbes Magazine, March 28, 2011, page 79
The quote speaks to data mining, and this blog post discusses Milner’s perspective. I argue that the “age of the mathematician” is not made possible simply from algorithms (which in many cases have existed for decades) but instead the combination of large datasets and the software to process such information. I even believe the software is more important than the hardware, which again, has largely existed in similar format for many years. Milner backs up his assertion about power and riches based on the strategic investments that his companies have made.
Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2008