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 train are roughly the same complexity as the C. elegans connectome. Sadly, this is not yet a recognized specialty within the broader field of machine learning.

The best way to get in touch with me is through email or to message me on LinkedIn.

I hold master’s degrees in physics and math and have worked as an Interface Analyst, a Software Engineer, a Director of Software Development, a Software Architect, and a Data Scientist. These days I’m professionally interested in R, Python, data visualization, applied statistics, machine learning, and healthcare data management.

Outside of work, I like puzzles: programming challenges such as Advent of Code or leetcode; traditional puzzles like the Moscow puzzles; puzzle games like euclidea or the Professor Layton games. I’ve also been thrilled by the recent wave of recreational mathematics and other educational content on Youtube and elsewhere: 3Blue1Brown, Ben Eater, Mathologer, Numberphile, Veritasium, back-pen/red-pen, or Dr.Peyam. I think this new wave of math and science popularizers are 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.

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 a Rmarkdown Notebook while articles that are mainly in Python are first authored in a JupyterLab Notebook and then ported to vanilla Markdown. Many of the photos come from Unsplash due to its good selection and permissive license. While the site is almost entirely static, it uses an Nginx server running on a tiny AWS EC2 instance, mainly for historical reasons. For HTTPS, it uses a free SSL cert from Let’s Encrypt.