Dimitris Politis writes: Statistics has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last two decades, adapting to a rapidly changing scientific environment. For example, under the leadership of pioneers such as the late Leo Breiman, our profession managed to prevail over challenges posed by machine learning by embracing it as the bona fide sub-field of statistics that it is. Similarly, recent advances in genomics have served as a catalyst for a host of new statistical research on multiple testing, high-dimensional data, and so on. This adaptivity shows that the profession is healthy and vibrant; on the other hand, there are colleagues who lament the reduction of mathematical aspects of our work as expressed in papers, PhD theses, and classroom curricula.

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