Use + to coerce string values to int
apparently csv parser in d3 always assumes strings and need to do explicit coerce to get numbers for things like max with a + op.
HTML
<script src="http://d3js.org/d3.v3.min.js"></script>
<html>
<body>
</body>
</html>
JavaScript
var data = [
{column1: 100, column3: 70, column2: "a"},
{column1: 9, column3: 50, column2: "b"},
{column1: 2, column3: 90, column2: "c"},
];
var o = {
maxWithCoerce: d3.max(data, function(d) { return [+d.column1 , d.column3]}),
maxWithoutCoerce: d3.max(data, function(d) { return d.column1; })
};
d3.select("body").selectAll("div").data(d3.keys(o)).enter()
.append("div")
.text(function (d) {return d + "=" + o[d]});