Randy Olson, a data scientist, builds data visualizations and machine learning projects, including name popularity tools and road trip route optimizers.
HN commenters share his name age calculator and trade results for particular names, noting it estimates how many people with a name are still alive.
Thank you for the kind words. :-) Although that app you linked is a bit different - it's showing when names were popular over time. This app goes one step further and calculates how many of those people are still alive and makes a best guess at how old someone is based solely on their first name.
I also made a version similar to the Baby Name Wizard that look solely at name popularity here: http://rhiever.github.io/baby-name-explorer/
And I suppose it's just a matter of aesthetics for which one you prefer in that case.
Cheers!
r
Peculiarly, there were dozens of instances of boys named Sue prior to Shel Silverstein writing "A Boy Named Sue", which makes me suspect that the song in question might very well have been a true story.
Curiously, the popularity of naming boys "Susan" [0] also peaked more than half a decade before the song was published. ("Sue", in contrast, peaked even earlier in the mid-40's, though it seems it made a comeback in the late-80's).
[0]: http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gender=M&Name=Susan
"Amy" is another interesting one, what influenced that? http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gender=F&Name=Amy
I just figured out that it shows a random one when you don't enter a query, that's cool.
Other spikes: Linda, Jordan, Mason, Deborah, Beth, Paige, Laurie, Chloe, Megan, Stella, Stacey, Kim
It seems like female names are much more likely to have sharp spikes in popularity verses male first names.
The increase of "Alexander" starting from the mid-80s looks really weird: http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gender=M&Name=Alexander
It's easy to see why names such as "Buzz" have the curves that they have (space race), but it's hard to trace any event that influenced more common names. For example, check "Jacob", "Justin". Does anybody have an idea as to why these curves have this shape?
Jeremiah (http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gender=M&Name=jeremiah) has an interesting rise in the 70s, but then disappears in the 80s (like so many things) but comes on strong again by the 2000s. The double humps doesn't seem to appear all that often, even clicking on the other examples in these HN comments, some of which appear to show spikes but are still normalish humps, not bimodal.
Little Women apparently: http://nameberry.com/babyname/Amy
The other names show similar shapes:
Meg: http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gender=F&Name=Meg
Jo: http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gender=F&Name=Jo
Beth: http://rhiever.github.io/name-age-calculator/index.html?Gender=F&Name=Beth
The second bump for Meg could be due to Meg Ryan?