When did Elvis die?
Thomas Schmelzer
Portfolio construction and technology @ ADIA | Commodities and LS Equities | Visiting Scholar at Stanford.
After celebrating being on the 25 quants listed by EQDerivatives, Inc it's time to focus on important stuff again. Elvis Presley is probably dead. This article is unable to put this debate at rest. I have no proof Elvis is indeed dead.
Parents out there name their children often impacted by events such as songs (Nikita by Elton John), by movies (Nikita again) or by artists. There seems to be a lag-relationship of approx. 9 months but unfortunately the data I have has only annual resolution. Here’s the graph for the number of Boys being born named Elvis.
The best years for Elvis have been:
There are a few less controversial events. He released his first album in 1956. This is well reflected in the data. Apparently he died in August 1977. It remains a mystery to me why the name picked up again in 1999, 2000 and 2007, 2008.
For those of you reading through my deep analysis you deserve an image of Nikita:
The full drama is revealed when analyzing girls named Elvis. Apparently Elvis was used for girls in the first half of the 20th century.
More data and more (Marimo) notebooks are in my repo: https://github.com/tschm/babynames