This talk is a look back at a working life in statistics, focussed on research and lecturing, starting as a young PhD researcher in 1964.
This talk is a look back at a working life in statistics, focussed on research and lecturing, starting as a young PhD researcher in 1964. The aim is to point to the technological changes, and personally as my example, to show how life progressed in universities. I’ll mention how a problem of Poisson processes led to a first crossing of the Atlantic in the QE2. I’ll describe the landscape of university statistics in my early years - research was squeezed in, computing was mechanical, presentation and copying were primitive, teaching loads were onerous, admin became demanding. Not all bad however, with life-long friends, many research satisfactions, international personal and family travel. Finally, I’ll briefly go back to a problem of point processes in my thesis I left 54 years ago and just recently still haven’t been able to solve completely, in spite of post-cataract lenses… .