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R.C. Bose Memorial Keynote Address

by David J. Hand
Professor of Statistics and Head of Statistics Section, Department of Mathematics
Imperial College, London, UK
 

David Hand is Professor of Statistics at Imperial College London, where he is Head of the Statistics Section in the Mathematics Department and also Head of the Mathematics in Banking and Finance programme in the Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He has published over twenty books on statistics and related areas, launched the journal Statistics and Computing, and served a term of office as editor of Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C. He is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries. He was awarded the Thomas L. Saaty Prize for Applied Advances in the Mathematical and Management Sciences in 2001, the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in Silver in 2002, the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining award for Outstanding Contributions in 2004, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. He is the President-elect of the International Federation of Classification Societies for 2006-7. His research interests include classification methods, the fundamentals of statistics, and data mining, and his applications interests include medicine and finance. He acts as a consultant to a wide range of organisations, including governments, banks, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturing industry, and health service providers.

Size Matters

R.C.Bose described himself as a mathematical statistician, and he certainly made highly significant contributions to both mathematics and statistics. Each of these disciplines has its foundations in notions of ‘how much’. That is, on notions of quantification, or of measurement. In this talk I go back to these fundamental notions. I explore what measurement means, how measurement procedures are constructed, how measurements can be interpreted, and how they are manipulated to make valid inferences about the real world. The ideas of measurement are so ubiquitous that we often fail to notice them. But that failure carries its own dangers. The world described by measurements is not the real world. Occasionally, mismatches arise between the real world and the imaginary world of our measurements. Sometimes these mismatches can have serious, even fatal consequences.

 

12th Annual Conference of the Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics (FIM XII)