Meet Ashley Hinton, Statistics Summer Scholar 2013-2014

Every year, the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland offers summer scholarships to a number of students so they can work with our staff on real-world projects. We’ll be profiling the 2013-2014 summer scholars on Stats Chat.

Ashley (right) is working with Dr Paul Murrell on a project entitled  Grid-based graphs in R.

Ashley explains:

“There’s a wonderful piece of software called graphviz that does a great job of making node and edge graphs that look really good. My research is about expanding an R package called gridGraphviz, which has graphviz lay out a graph, then uses the R ‘grid’ graphics package to draw the graph.

“This research is useful as current node and edge packages in R draw graphs using R’s default ‘graphics’ package. Building a package that uses the ‘grid’ package means we can take advantage of all the flexibility that ‘grid’ allows, including making interactive graphs and exporting our plots in a variety of useful formats. We also hope it will make very good-looking graphs.”

More about Ashley:

“I have a BA in philosophy, and have just finished my second year of a BSc in Statistics. I would like to train to be a high school teacher after I graduate.

“When I finished my compulsory high-school maths classes, I swore I would never use maths again, and set about becoming a philosopher. Much to my surprise, I found that philosophy and logic led me to become very, very interested in mathematics, enough that I decided I wanted to return to university and learn all about it.

“Statistics is, for me, a meeting place of my interest in mathematics and computer programming. It can allow us to produce something that can communicate useful ideas about the world to other people. It’s a form of literacy I honestly had no idea I was missing out on until I came back to learn about it.

“This summer, I’m going to spend a few weeks travelling around the South Island treating myself to some wonderful summer weather.”