From the Desk Of: Tati Howell
Ruobin Gong writes in praise of Bin Yu and Rebecca Barter’s Veridical Data Science, which she used to modernize a course:
As any seasoned instructor could attest, there is a certain kind of comfort to teaching a course on repeat. We know the lay of the land like the…
Daniela Witten is frustrated with (some of) her students “outsourcing their brains to LLMs”:
For decades, the university classroom was as if frozen in time: blackboards became whiteboards and transparencies transformed to Beamer*, but that was about it. But early 2020 brought with it a series of…
Linjun Zhang continues with the second in our invited series of articles on LLMs and AI, and their implications for the statistics profession. Should statisticians be worried about being replaced or left behind? Or should we, in fact, seize this opportunity and lead our neighboring disciplines? Linjun argues that the…
Professor Emeritus Richard (Dick) Lynn Dykstra passed away peacefully on September 19, 2025. Dick received his PhD in 1968 from the University of Iowa, where his doctoral work on characterizing a conditional expectation with respect to a sigma-lattice was advised by Tim Robertson and Jon Cryer. Dick then worked at…
David F. Findley passed away in June 2025 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. David was born in Washington DC on December 27, 1940. He earned a BS (1962) and MA (1963) in mathematics from the University of Cincinnati. He then lived in Germany, studying functional analysis under Gottfried Köthe, obtaining…