Hello and welcome to my website. My name is Jakub Marian, and I am a Czech data scientist, linguist, geographer, and musician.
Mathematics and programming have been an important part of my life since the age of 15, when I started developing professional websites for corporate clients, through high school (where I won a European prize for young scientists for my work on computer simulation of liquids) up to university (with a scholarship and master’s degree in Mathematics at Berlin Mathematical School, being mostly interested in differential geometry and probability theory).
After a 3-year pause devoted mainly to languages and geography, I had an opportunity to start working as a data scientist for the largest Czech bank, which I consider my most enriching professional experience so far. I soon became the chapter lead of a team of 12 talented people and had the opportunity to co-develop the data science process for the entire organization from the ground up, from actually coding libraries in Python to co-designing the solution architecture of the whole system, all that while working on diverse machine learning projects for departments such as HR, marketing, risk management, customer service, car insurance, or economic research.
Linguistics is a very practical subject, the way I see it. I speak 4 languages fluently: English, German, French, and Czech (and I can read Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian and Polish). I actually only became interested in languages when I was about 20 years old, but I continuously fell in love with more and more languages, which allowed me to understand other cultures and communicate with a broader audience. This culminated in my enrolling in a Ph.D. programme in Corpus and Theoretical Linguistics at Charles University in Prague, where I currently research errors made by non-native speakers of various languages, which is a fruitful source of ideas for my articles and books.
Geography is an important multidisciplinary field for me, but my journey towards the subject was mostly coincidental. Shortly after starting this blog, I created several maps to visualize a few statistics I found interesting. The maps turned out to be quite a success, so I started creating more and more maps and continuously learned new graphic design and GIS techniques to be able draw various types of maps.
Via my work with maps, I got interested in economic geography and eventually decided to get a (second) master’s degree in Economics at the Banking Institute in Prague. I believe that this allows me to analyse issues of international importance beyond their mere graphical representation and provide well-founded commentary to my maps.
Music is something that is very close to my heart because both of my parents are musicians, and I have been playing the classical guitar since the age of six (completing 15 years of formal music education and then playing in a guitar ensemble). As a practising musician, I play the guitar (both acoustic and electric) and the M-Stick, which is a guitar-like instrument I invented. I’ve been also working on picking up the piano and the flute and perform research in music theory.
If you have any questions, please contact me. If you are interested in more detailed information about me, see my biography or a list of interviews I have given.