Abstract:

As well as coining the word software, John Tukey famously remarked that the best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard. Tukey's point was that, at least in academia, being a statistician gives the freedom to pursue an interest in almost any field, given you have a slight corner on something. A similar point can be made about the worldly and unconventional style of the British writer Geoff Dyer. In this talk, I will argue for what I will call the Tukey-Dyer method: the inspired choice of "a slight corner on something" as the starting point for creative work, even when you are not an expert. I will discuss the surprising role that this method can play in searching for novel ideas in statistics, and how it has helped in starting various projects I have been involved with throughout my career. That is, this is a talk about the background stories we rarely tell each other when doing research in statistics -- what was the seed of the idea and what was the underlying motivation at a personal level?