Category Archives: Math

Groupon Visualization in HBR

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Paul Butler

A version of my Groupon visualization appears in the latest Harvard Business Review. At the suggestion of their editorial and design staff, I re-did the visualization to focus on a smaller subset of the data: deals in San Francisco. I … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Mining | 3 Comments

What $480M of Gross Revenue Looks Like to Groupon

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Paul Butler

On Saturday, the Wall St. Journal posted details of an internal Groupon memo that reported $760 million in revenue last year. The WSJ article came just as I was finishing up a visualization of some data I had collected on … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Mining, R, Statistics | 14 Comments

Visualizing Facebook Friends: Eye Candy in R

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Paul Butler

Earlier this week I published a data visualization on the Facebook Engineering blog which, to my surprise, has received a lot of media covereage. I’ve received a lot comments about the image, many asking for more details on how I … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, Data Mining, Math, R | 44 Comments

Data Structures for Range-Sum Queries (slides)

Posted on July 10, 2010 by Paul Butler

This week I attended the Canadian Undergraduate Mathematics Conference. I enjoyed talks from a number of branches of mathematics, and gave a talk of my own on range-sum queries. Essentially, range-aggregate queries are a class of database queries which involve … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, Math | 1 Comment

An experiment in A/B Testing my Résumé

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Paul Butler

Objective I’ll admit it: my résumé doesn’t stand out. I’ve had some great internships, but also a tendency to work for companies that aren’t (yet!) household names. And though I’m doing fine academically, it’s not well enough to stand out … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Mining, Math, R, Statistics | 22 Comments

Why R doesn't suck

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Paul Butler

I first encountered the R programming language a few years ago when I needed to make some plots. Although I’ve used it occasionally since, I always considered it a sort of “Perl for statisticians” — a useful swiss-army knife with … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Mining, Haskell, Math, Programming, Python, R, Ruby | 4 Comments

Groupon Math: Data Scraping to Estimate Revenue

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Paul Butler

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the Chicago startup Groupon. Groupon brands itself as a group-buying site, but it’s really more of a localized version of what woot.com does. They post a new deal (which they call a … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Mining, Math | 18 Comments

webFractal: Web-based Fractal Explorer

Posted on February 17, 2007 by Paul Butler

Last weekend, I won a nice new Toshiba laptop in a local software competition. My entry was a web-based fractal explorer. I had a lot of fun making it, and it is fun to play with as well. I have … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractals, Java, Math, Web Apps | Leave a comment