Category Archives: Math

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 | Leave a 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 | 4 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 | 1 Comment

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 | 11 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