Via everyone in the profession: the statistician Frederick Mosteller has died. Mosteller was one of the great leaders of the generation of statisticians in which our field went from being an annex of mathematics (as it was when he attended Carnegie Tech) to an autonomous, institutionalized discipline. He had an astonishing range as a researcher, but is perhaps best known for his work on stochastic theories of learning theory and the authorship of the Federalist Papers. He was also a notable teacher, as his essay “Classroom and Platform Performance” suggests, and in the later part of his career tried to bring elementary inferential hygenie to educational research. More anecdotes are available from Tales of the Statisticians, or this brief sketch by his student Stephen Fienberg.
From the category archives:
Obituary
Via Scott McLemee I see that Frank Zeidler, former socialist mayor of Milwaukee and all-round good chap, died a couple of weeks ago. A wonderful obit here. Even conservatives can celebrate him — he was married just once, for 67 years, and they had 6 children. A good innings and a great life.
For CT extra credit, which cast member refers to Zeidler in Waynes World?
BBC obit here.
I surfed over to the Daily Telegraph’s “obits page”:http://tinyurl.com/qxxoc , looking for someone who wasn’t there, and was struck by the way in which the headline writers dispassionately express the achievements of the dead. So
bq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — Jordanian terrorist associated with bombings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq.
is immediately followed by
bq. Raymond Davis, Jr — Physicist whose proof that the Sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions won him the Nobel.
Almost as if proving the sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions and beheading hostages were just different ways of spending one’s life. Sadly, I also learned that “Billy Preston is dead”:http://tinyurl.com/oas9n aged only 59.
Today’s Guardian has an “obituary for Peter Alexander”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1770686,00.html (written by my colleague Andrew Pyle).
Sad news. Jane Jacobs, thinker about cities, eclectic economist and brilliant nonconformist, about whom I’ve blogged a “couple”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/08/jane-jacobs/ of “times”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/07/24/lunch-with-jane-jacobs/ , died this morning in Toronto. “Globe and Mail”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060425.wjanejacobs0425/BNStory/National/home and “Toronto Star”:http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1145976509962&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154 among others have reports.
Update: I’ll add links to other coverage and obituaries sporadically. “Douglas Martin in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/books/26jacobs.html . “Jeff Pruzan in the Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/225787b2-d491-11da-a357-0000779e2340.html .
John McGahern “has just died”:http://www.rte.ie/arts/2006/0330/mcgahernj.html. I knew that he’d been ill; he had been supposed to come to Washington DC a couple of weeks ago, but his trip was cancelled at short notice. This recent “Jonathan Yardley review”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030901841.html of his memoirs give some flavour of the man.
bq. His mother hoped that he would become a priest and say Mass for her, but his life took a different direction. In his early teens, he discovered reading, “a strange and complete happiness when all sense of time is lost,” much of which he did floating on the nearby river in a small boat. Gradually “a fantastical idea” formed in his mind: “Why take on any single life — a priest, a soldier, teacher, doctor, airman — if a writer could create all these people far more vividly? In that one life of the mind, the writer could live many lives and all of life. . . . Instead of being a priest of God, I would be the god of a small, vivid world. I must have had some sense of how outrageous and laughable this would appear to the world, because I told no one, but it did serve its first purpose — it set me free.”
bq. McGahern has taken full advantage of that freedom. He has published six novels and four collections of short stories, received numerous honors and much well-deserved praise. He is regarded as one of Ireland’s finest contemporary writers, not least because he writes about his native land with such clarity and honesty. His difficult childhood informs much of his work — in particular his best-known novel, The Dark (1965) — but in that as in this memoir, he seeks not to exploit his past but to understand it and to make it pertinent and meaningful to others.
Whenever a politician who has done something really bad, whether it is the result of a terrible misjudgement (the kindest gloss on Blair and Bush) or worse (Clinton), and fails even to resign, I can’t help thinking of Profumo, and wondering what he thinks.
(Via Chris Brooke, who asks whether Profumo is the last surviving war time MP. Apparently not — but he was the last survivor who voted in the Chamberlain ousting, and on the right side, which counts for a lot.)
If, like me, you adored Linda Smith, you might want to put aside 30 minutes to listen to the News Quiz tribute to her. If you’d never heard of Linda Smith until I mentioned her last week you should definitely listen to the tribute — 30 minutes of an incredibly funny, and manifestly delightful, person. If she doesn’t make you laugh I don’t know what to say. (I’m not going to tell you what the name of this post refers to — you have to listen to the show). If the link above is slow, try this and then click on listen again.
Linda Smith is dead.
I saw her only once, when she was unkown, as the cabaret act at a Socialist Outlook conference in the 1980’s. A small and intimate setting and she was simply one of the funniest people I’d ever seen in my life. I couldn’t believe it when I subsequently saw her on afternoon TV some 10 years later. She was terrific on The News Quiz, especially, for some reason, when Alan Coren was on too. Only, in my opinion, A Brief History of Time Wasting was not so good, but even that I’m pleased to have a bunch of tapes of. A nice tribute by Jeremy Hardy here. Obit here.
Peter Strawson has died. There are obituaries in the “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1709718,00.html and the “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2040505_1,00.html . I met him a few times, as I was briefly a member of the Magdalen SCR. Of his contribution to philosophy, I know little beyond “Freedom and Resentment”, but I shall always have an impression of an immaculately dressed figure smoking a cigarette in a peculiarly distinguished way and making witty conversation.
Speaking completely selfishly, for me the worst immediate outcome of the 1997 Labour victory was Tony Banks’s inclusion in the government. I had not anticipated it (I gather that he, too, was “gobsmacked”), and I realised instantly that it meant he could no longer be a participant in the World Service’s Talking Politics program; his participation had been the icing on the cake, as it were. Very sorry to hear of his death, and my thoughts go out to his family. The BBC obit violates the norm of not speaking ill of the dead by mentioning his favourite football team. A cute account of his wit is here.
Update: A much fuller obit in the Grauniad.
The BBC is obsessed with the anniversary of Lennon’s death. For my own part I have four memories — the shock of Radio 4 (the Today Programme) announcing the death in the morning; the amazing sense of loss at school, mitigated only by the bizarre spectacle of Lennon-look-alike Nick P crying his eyes out all day long; somebody on Question Time saying that everyone would remember where they were when they heard about Lennon’s death, and finally, watching Not the Nine O Clock News that week (Thursday?) and wondering all the way through the show how they would respond to his death — and being first touched, and then shocked, by the way they did it (am I the only person who remembers this?)
Anyway, I’m deliberately posting this the day after the anniversary in order to alert you to 2 wonderful shows full of cover versions:
Mike Harding’s show, with numerous folkies covering songs from Rubber Soul (released 40 years ago this week? Amazing)
and
Lennon Live with numerous non-folkies covering Lennon songs, with varying degrees of success (My favourite: Teddy Thompson, whom I’d never heard before, and is eerie)
Other Lennon-related radio shows include a portrait narrated by Mark Ratcliffe and a play based on Ray Connolly’s reflections on his death.
Oh, and you can hear Libby Purves reminisce about him, too, but its a bit odd.
Ted Wragg is dead, aged 67. Guardian obituary is here. I never met Ted, only once spying him across the table at a long meeting, but I read his columns in the TES from my early teens, and was always struck by the nice combination of ironic humour and passionate concern. He was prolific and energetic, funny (he sometimes contributed jokes for Bremner, and the News Huddlines) and always ready to puncture the presumptions of the powerful. The obit says that an email address has been set up for messages of condolence at education@exeter.ac.uk
I know one should not speak ill of the dead, but I suspect he is one of the culprits (along with others I shan’t mention) for the tendency of education policymakers and even academics in the UK to indulge in excessive football analogies. A very sad loss.