What is in common between Aristotle,
A-bomb and data mining?

John Aristotle Phillips was a brilliant but an unmotivated student who had gotten through high school without much effort. ... For his required junior research paper at Princeton, he chose a topic that he felt would motivate himself sufficiently: "How to Build Your Own Atomic Bomb" which came to him after attending a nuclear proliferation seminar.

All physics majors were assigned a faculty adviser to help them through this project - but his adviser Freeman Dyson told him that with that subject: he'd be on-his-own, that no help could be given at all - and did he still want to proceed? When Phillips said "yes", he was handed a list of only the most elemental nuclear physics texts and simply told, "Good luck".

...
He did get an A for his paper, which was eventually classified. The story was described in a 1979 book Mushroom : The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid and the book was optioned for a movie - which was never made.

Philips then twice run for Congress from Connecticut and tried to get the list of registered voters in his district. Such records were kept by every state, but obtaining them was no easy task. While technically public information, these lists were often jealously controlled by local party bosses. To gain access, a candidate had to have the right connections-or be willing to pay.

"There was a realization: if we can't get [the voter list], which we're entitled to, then we're dead," Phillips says. Without it, he could not perform the basic tasks of a field campaign-sending mailers, knocking on doors, making phone calls.

Eventually he did acquire the list, and he had his brother, Dean, write a program, on his sleek new Apple II, to format it. The equivalent of a simple spreadsheet application, the program was advanced for its time.

This he has parlayed into a career in data mining, and he has long been the CEO of the firm named - appropriately enough - Aristotle after his middle name. He and others in the field can determine who votes for whom in some rather astonishing detail.

www.dailykos.com/story/2010/8/5/165910/8471

An earlier profile in Vanity Fair: Big Brother Inc. (Dec 2007)

Knowing your business is big business for Aristotle Inc., whose Orwellian database of voter records has been an essential campaign tool for every president since Ronald Reagan. As the 2008 race heats up, the company's shadowy founder, John Aristotle Phillips, unveils his most powerful personal-space invader yet.