Statistics: An All-Encompassing Discipline

This talk is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who passed away on May 30th. When I was growing up, my mother was involved in community organizations and found herself elected president of a local volunteer group which raised funds for cancer patients. As president, she had to give a number of speeches, thanking her Board for all of their help, thanking volunteers and donors and urging the members to get more members and to continue volunteering. And not being used to public speaking, she rehearsed her speeches over and over again in front of my father and me until we were bored silly and she got it right. When the real speech came, she surprised my father and me by thanking us for our support. So in essence, I have been preparing for this moment since I was about 10 years old. The theme of this meeting is Statistics: An All-Encompassing Discipline. The theme is based on a plaque found at the entrance of the ASA office building. The plaque states the mission of ASA: “To promote excellence in the application of statistical science across the wealth of human endeavor.” How well do we succeed? How does statistical science expand into new fields? Do statistical contributions get the recognition we statisticians deserve? Or do we make quiet, but sometimes brilliant, contributions in the background? One measure of success is that our ASA sections reflect how all-encompassing our discipline has become: the ASA has 24 Sections ranging from the sciences (e.g., biometrics, biopharmaceutical statistics, epidemiology, physical and engineering sciences, environmental statistics) to business (e.g., business and economic statistics, quality and productivity, marketing) to policy (e.g., government statistics, health policy statistics, defense and national security) to the social sciences (e.g., social statistics and survey research). As noted by Sir David Cox in his talk yesterday, what unifies us is not the subject matter we work in, but the methodology and the thought processes that help us solve the problems that arise in these many, diverse fields. We have the ability to see analogies and differences between the problem at hand and other work, to see how old theory can be extended to a new situation. Since many of us have our primary training in statistics or perhaps biostatistics or computer science or even mathematics, our contributions to other scientific fields necessarily