It has been my good fortune to meet and get to know many remarkable
people, mostly statisticians and mathematicians, and to derive much pleasure
and benefit from these contacts. They were teachers, colleagues and students,
and the following pages sketch their careers and our interactions. Also
included are a few persons with whom I had little or no direct contact but
whose ideas had a decisive influence on my work. To provide some coherence,
the account is largely chronological and follows the steps of my own career.
Taken together, these sketches provide a very personal picture of the development of statistical theory from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is the period
between two revolutions: that of Fisher, Neyman, and Pearson, which laid
the foundations for the classical statistical theory of that period; and the
second revolution, forty years later, brought about by the advent of the
computer, which turned statistics in new directions