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For some reason I stranded on a page where I could see the number of master’s students from Daimi. For kicks and giggles, I looked up myself and found I was number 1105 out of currently 1337 (heh).
Procrastinating, I also wanted to look up my PhD number, and found a page with all PhDs listen. Alas this list did not contain numbers, so I could not immediately look up my number.
No problem; I just downloaded the 4 pages of PhD students (wget or save as), filtered all names out (grep Name *.html 
and reversed the result (tail -r and cleaned up the results (sed). Loading the results into a text editor, I found my PhD number: 153.
A bit more processing (more sed and a bit of uniq -c gave me the number of PhDs produced per year. I thought the results were interesting enough to share them (not really):
Click for larger version (PDF)
We see that the number of PhDs produced has increased, peaking in the mid 2000s (top left chart). The middle left chart shows the total number of PhDs produced as a function of the year.
The two top right charts shows the total number of PhDs as function of the number of years after the department started (approximately), using either a single-logaritmic (top) or double logarithmic (middle). This indicates that the growth can hardly be described as exponential, but fairly well as polynomial. We note, however, that the first 5 entries seem to have a disproportional large influence on the choice of trend (the points in the last half of the line doesn’t really fit well along the trend-line)
The three bottom charts shows the total number of PhDs, removing the first 5 entries (as the department was young) and the last year (which contains incomplete data). Now the data suddenly fits exponential growth fairly well. The points fit well along the trend-line in the middle chart (though it seems to be declining slightly) and not at all along the trend-line in the bottom right chart.
Wasn’t that a lot of useless information?
Recent Comments
2 Comments
at 16:09
Since you haven’t published the pre-processed text file, I had to do a relative count from you in the list. I found out that we are 19 PhDs apart giving me a PhD-number of 134. I also noticed from your statistics that the PhD production at Daimi has decreased significant since I finished in 2006. What has gone wrong?
at 16:26
Good question.
We do notice, however that the two peaks (2003 and 2006) are both right next to very low years (2004/5), so likely they are just because some got delayed or finished before time, making the number for 2000/1-2006/7 around 12/13 pretty consistently.
Still, 2008 seems fairly low, especially considering there has been a focus on an increased production of PhDs in the latter years, though that may only show itself in the upcoming years.