iX: There are rumors that you sleep only 3 hours a night. And that you read/write email in these hours too. Is this true?

Schmidt: Hahaha, well, yes and no... For the 5 years between getting my doctorate in 1994 and getting tenure in 1999, I somehow managed to live on 5-6 hours of sleep a night. If it wasn't for Diet Coke and a very tolerant girlfriend (who is now my wife) I don't think I could have survived... Now that I've got tenure and am married, I definitely get more sleep!

I do frequently still get up in the middle of the night, however, to answer email. This is a habit I learned when I was a graduate student at UCI. My doctoral advisor, Dr. Tatsuya Suda, kept the strangest hours of any professor I've ever met. Every day he would work from midnight until 8 am, sleep for 4 hours, then work from noon until 8pm, and sleep another 4 hours. The best way to get his undivided attention was to communicate with him early in the morning. Thus, I learned to wake up at several times during the night and exchange email with him, so we could collaborate more effectively on the papers we were writing together.