About Me

I’m Martin O’Leary, and this is my blog.

If you’ve heard of me, it’s probably either because of my participation in Kaggle, a website for competitive data mining, or through my series of posts on Eurovision statistics. I’m a recovering pure mathematician, and I enjoy messing about with data analysis slightly more than is probably healthy. I strongly dislike the term “data science”, but I don’t have a better one.

I’m a research officer in the Swansea Glaciology Group at Swansea University, which tends to impress people at parties. My current research looks at interactions between glaciers and the oceans, particularly on iceberg calving events like this one. Previously I worked at the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences at the University of Michigan and at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, where I got my PhD under Poul Christoffersen on ”Frontal processes on tidewater glaciers”.

I have a Twitter and a GitHub. You can also email me if that doesn’t feel like a weird social imposition.

Some of my proudest achievements

• The White House once compared me to Newton and Einstein.
• I once came second in a phone-in poll on CUR1350 (now CamFM) to find the sexiest voice in Cambridge.
• I was a semifinalist in the 2009 series of the quiz show University Challenge, during which Jeremy Paxman confided that he “enjoyed Mr O’Leary’s bullshit”.
• I once wrote a blog post which was read by over 2% of the population of Malta