About Me

Oran Looney

Hi, I’m Oran Looney. I do math. I write programs. I science… data? That doesn’t sound right. I -tican stats? No, that’s even worse.

My ideal job title would be Senior Nematode Wrangler because many of the neural networks I work with are roughly the same complexity as the C. elegans worm’s connectome. Sadly, this is not yet a recognized specialty within the broader field of machine learning, so you should probably think of me as a Data Scientist or a Machine Learning Engineer.

I hold master’s degrees in physics and math, and have worked in the healthcare and insurance sectors doing software development and data science for two decades. These days, I’m professionally interested in data science, machine learning, applied statistics, software architecture, and occasionally data visualization.

I am actively looking for a new position; if you’re hiring, please take a look at my résumé and get in touch if it looks like a good fit.

Interests

Outside of work, I enjoy recreational mathematics, the history of science and mathematics, programming challenges such as Advent of Code or LeetCode, and puzzle games like Baba Is You. I maintain a repository of quotes and poems containing pithy wit and wisdom for programming and science. I sometimes make small web games and demos. As for my other interests, well, I can only refer you to all the topics covered on this site.

I’ve also been thrilled by the recent wave of recreational mathematics and other educational content on YouTube such as 3Blue1Brown, Ben Eater, Folding Ideas, Mathologer, Steve Mould, Two Minute Papers, Veritasium, or Welch Labs. I think this new wave of math and science popularizers is doing great work and I encourage you to check them out and support them if you can. Or if you’re just feeling charitable in general, consider supporting Wikipedia or helping hungry children in Wisconsin.

Colophon

This site was built with blogdown, an R package that combines Pandoc with the static site generator Hugo. It makes extensive use of MathJax for formatting LaTeX equations. Articles that are mainly in R are authored in Rmarkdown, while articles that are mainly in Python are first authored in a Jupyter Lab and then ported to vanilla Markdown. Many of the photos come from Unsplash due to its good selection of images with permissive licenses. For HTTPS, it uses a free SSL cert from Let’s Encrypt.