The usual apologies for submitting a non-S question, but the
knowledgibility of the membership of this list is just too
irresistible to pass up ....
Anyhow, my question:
Some years ago, God knows how many, I read an interview with an
eminent statistician in some journal. The journal was almost surely
American; It ***may*** have been the Notices of the American Math
Society. The statistician in question was of African-American
descent, and I believe that the article indicated that he was the
first of his race to become prominent in the field of statistics.
One thing about the interview that sticks in my memory was the guy's
description of how he turned into a Bayesian. He said that someone
--- from some US government department, I think --- asked him (some
time in the late 1930s) what was the probability that World War II
would happen. He says that he told his inquirer that either World
War II would happen or it wouldn't, and that probability did not
apply. The inquirer went away, dejected, and our eminent
statistician came to feel more and strongly that his answer had been
wrong and that the way to arrive at a right answer lay through
Bayesian reasoning.
Does anyone out there know who it is that I'm talking about? Could
anyone possibly give me a pointer/reference to the interview which I
so vaguely recall?
I would be ever so humbly grateful!
cheers,
Rolf Turner
rolf@math.unb.ca
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