About Me
I'm a Math/Computer Science student at the University of Waterloo. I grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
In my free time, I write code for open-source and my own projects. Away from the keyboard, I enjoy reading, sailing, running, geocaching, travel, and learning French.
You can find me on LinkedIn, twitter, and Facebook. You can also contact me the old-fashioned way at blog@paulbutler.org. Here is my résumé.
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Category Archives: Math
Groupon Visualization in HBR
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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