Fig. 2: Creative trajectories and hot-streak dynamics: three exemplary careers.

a, e, i We fit the hot-streak model to careers of a Jackson Pollock, e Peter Jackson and i John B. Fenn. The hot-streak model¹ assumes that the impact of works produced in a career (\({{\log }}\,{{{{{\mathrm{price}}}}}}\) for artworks, IMDB rating for films and \({{\log }}{C}_{10}\) for papers) is drawn from two normal distributions (\({\Gamma }_{0}\) and \({\Gamma }_{H}\)), where \({\Gamma }_{0}\) captures the typical performance and \({\Gamma }_{H}\) captures the performance during hot streak. The red line denotes the hot-streak model. \({t}_{\uparrow }\) and \({t}_{\downarrow }\) marks the beginning and the end of hot streak. To avoid mixing across the two periods, we measure the entropy of styles or topics for works produced before and during hot streak by excluding those produced during the year of the transition. b–d We project the 200-dimensional representation of artworks produced by Jackson Pollock to a 3D t-SNE embedding space. Different styles are shown in different colors, and nodes with larger sizes denote those produced during hot streak. For Jackson Pollock, his hot streak is well aligned with the famous “drip period” (1946–1950). The entropy of works produced during this period is substantially lower than typical (\(H=0.25\) vs \(H=0.43\)), suggesting an intensive focus on one particular style (d). This exploitation behavior contrasts the work he produced in the period leading up to hot streak, which was characterized by an unusual exploration of new and diverse styles (\(H=0.59\)) (c). f–h We project the films vectors produced by Peter Jackson to a t-SNE embedding space. Peter Jackson’s hot streak covers “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy (\(H=0.31\)) (h). Before his hot streak, however, Jackson worked on diverse types of films including biography and horror-comedy (\(H=0.59\)) (g). j–l For the career of John Fenn, we study the co-citing network of his papers. Before his hot streak, Fenn worked on numerous different topics from excitation on hot surfaces to dimers (\(H=0.55\)) (k). But during his hot streak, Fenn intensively focused on electrospray ionization (\(H=0.25\)) (l), which eventually won him the chemistry Nobel in 2002.