David Vere-Jones (SRA Distinguished Associate and VUW Emeritus Professor) turned 75 on 17 April 2011. To mark his 75th year SRA hosted a series of informal seminars in his honour. The choice of seminar topic was left entirely to the speaker. As might be expected given David's broad interests, the seminars could be, but were not limited to, presentations on the speaker's latest theoretical or applied research, discussions on the history, teaching and dissemination of statistics, or personal reminiscences of working with David.
The seminars were held at Waikanae beach north of Wellington near David's
home on Wednesday afternoons following lunch. Because space was limited,
attendance was by invitation.
Here is the list of the seminars (see
here for the abstracts):
4th May, 2011: David Harte, Statistics Research Associates "Modelling NZ
Seismicity with the ETAS Model" (abstract,
slides)
20 July, 2011: Eugene Seneta, School of Mathematics and Statistics at University
of Sydney "Canberra Times (1965-1968) and After" (abstract,
slides)
27 July, 2011: Jiancang Zhuang, Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo "Testing significance of earthquake precursors: Against complete randomness? Or against earthquake clustering models?" (abstract, slides)
7 September 2011: Peter Smith, Canterbury University "Random matrices, quadratic forms and networks of antenna arrays in wireless communications" (abstract, slides, photos)
12 October 2011: Len Cook (Former Government Statistician) "Putting a value on statistical methods and practice" (abstract, slides)
26 October 2011: Yosihiko Ogata, Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo "The M9 Tohoku-Oki earthquake and statistical seismology" (abstract, slides)
21 December 2011: Sharleen Forbes, Statistics New Zealand and Victoria University "New directions in statistics education - the impact of technology" (abstract, slides)
18 January 2012: Mark Bebbington, Massey University "The Development of Statistical Volcanology: A Personal Experience" (abstract, slides)
1 February 2012: Daryl Daley, University of Melbourne "Regeneration and Markovianity" (abstract, slides)
15 February 2012: Geoff Eagleson, Australian School of Business, University of NSW "How can the interactions between Statistics and Business be improved? - Reflections on a journey from Pure Mathematics to management consultancy" (abstract, slides, The Hal Varian Video)
11 April 2012: Shirley Pledger, Professor, School of
Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, Victoria University of
Wellington "Capture-recapture, finite mixtures, correspondence analysis and
working for David Vere-Jones" (abstract,
slides)
Victoria University's Third Wellington Workshop in Probability and Mathematical Statistics was also held in David's honour. A list of speakers and titles is listed here.