Fall 2007 Thursday, September 6   Robert V. Hogg CLAS Alumni Fellow Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science University of Iowa "Small Steps and Giant Leaps" 3:00 Refreshments in 241 Schaeffer Hall 3:30 Talk in 140 Schaeffer Hall The first part of this talk is a history lesson after probability really started, in 1654, by a gambler, Chevalier de Mere, asking Blaise Pascal to explain certain observations that he had made about dice. After that giant leap by Pascal and his partner, Fermat, many more were to follow by: the Bernoullis, deMoivre, Bayes, Gauss and LaPlace, Galton, K. Pearson, Gosset (Student), Fisher, Neyman and E. Pearson, among others. After that, there have been contributions by many excellent statisticians and probabilists; and it is difficult now to select the giant leaps, but those by Wald, J. Savage, deFinetti, Efron, and C.R. Rao should be and will be considered in the future, say 50 to 100 years from today. Most statisticians really just "fill in the cracks" left by the great ones; that is, they take small but worthwhile steps to help complete our professional advancement. Using a few members of our present faculty, illustrations will be given.

All talks are free and open to the public. To receive colloquium reminders via email, please send a request to statistics@uiowa.edu. The 37th Annual Craig Lectures will be on October 11 and 12. Our speaker this year is Nancy Reid from the University of Toronto. Past colloquia: Spring 2007 | Fall 2006 | Spring 2006 | Fall 2005 | Spring 2005 | Fall 2004 | Spring 2004 | Fall 2003 | Spring 2003 | Fall 2002 | Spring 2002 | Fall 2001 | Spring 2001 | Fall 2000 | Spring 2000 | Fall 1999 | Spring 1999 | Fall 1998 | Spring 1998

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