Professor Persi Diaconis delivers the keynote address Oct. 16 in Statler Auditorium for the Department of Statistical Science's celebratory conference Frank DiMeo/University Photography
With a long, distinguished history of numerical study already squarely rooted at Cornell, the new Department of Statistical Science celebrated its formation last week with a conference, Oct. 16 through 18, on "Statistics for the 21st Century."
Persi Diaconis, Cornell professor of mathematics and of operations research and industrial engineering, and a member of the university's new department, provided the keynote address on "The Search for Randomness," Thursday night. A musician-magician turned mathematician, he was a visiting professor at Cornell in 1996-97.
Diaconis, who studied music at Juilliard and toured at one time with magician Dai Vernon, explained that in his search for randomness, he's found that the report that coin flips come up heads half the time and tails the other half has been greatly exaggerated.
The same coin flipped 100 times in precisely same way, will always end up on the same side, he explained. The seemingly random act of flipping a coin thus depends on the finite rate of a coin's spin and its velocity. And Diaconis demonstrated a small, mechanical coin-flipping device he has created to prove his point.
"With this device, I can get a coin to come up heads 100 out of 100 times," he told the audience.
Using overhead projections, Diaconis went on to discuss how roulette wheels, dart boards and certain card tricks may seem random, but when statistics and physics are applied to understand what lies behind them, the curtain of randomness is lifted.
Prior to Diaconis' address, Cornell Provost Don M. Randel described the university's great interest in the development of the multidisciplinary statistics department.
"Cornell has had a great strength in statistics for a long time, and we are here to celebrate a coming together for an even greater impact than we've had in the past," Randel said. The department officially came into being July 1.
Bruce Turnbull, Cornell professor of operations research and industrial engineering and former director of the Cornell Statistics Center, spoke before Randel and explained that other universities, such as Northwestern, the University of California at Los Angeles and Oxford University also have recently established statistics departments.
The Cornell department's structure is universitywide and will allow better coordination of teaching, consulting, research and computing in the field, according to Charles E. McCulloch, Cornell professor of biological statistics and chair of the new department. McCulloch also said structuring the department in this way makes it possible to >make an undergraduate degree in statistical science more widely available, and, he said, an applied master's program in statistical science is under development. The doctoral program curriculum, which had been organized under the Graduate School, will remain largely unchanged.
The new department will initially have 29 faculty with primary and joint appointments, McCulloch said. The chair will report to the dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
In addition to Diaconis, statisticians from other universities and organizations who provided lectures during the symposium included: David Moore of Purdue, president of the American Statistical Association; Ron Snee, an industrial statistician with Bell Atlantic; Colin Begg of Memorial Sloan Kettering Institute; Michael Meredith of Procter & Gamble; Iain Johnstone of Stanford; Yehudi Vardi of Rutgers; George Cybenko of Dartmouth; and Chris Pelkie of the Cornell Theory Center.
Following the conference on Friday, participants gathered for a banquet in honor of Lionel Weiss, Cornell professor emeritus of operations research and industrial engineering.
On Saturday, Turnbull moderated a panel discussion on the "High Points and Pitfalls: Starting a New Department." Jan de Leeuw of UCLA, Tom Louis of the University of Minnesota, Ingram Olkin of Stanford and Allan Sampson of the University of Pittsburgh served as panelists.