John Hartigan

Eugene Higgins Professor of Statistics

John Hartigan, B.S. University of Sydney, Ph.D. Princeton University, faculty member at Yale since 1969. You were born in Canberra, Australia when it was just a small town, attended a not-very -strong high school which nevertheless had a fantastic mathematics teacher, and as a result of his teaching, and your own genius, came in first in the state of New South Wales in mathematics. And everything from there has been uphill! You became a world-class statistician, a pioneer in statistical graphics, statistical computing, and data analysis; and an expert over an amazingly broad range of both applications and theory. Your highly influential books on clustering and Bayes Theory have made you one of the great figures in your field, here and abroad. You have written scores of articles on statistical problems, for journals both statistical and not so statistical—and whatever you have done, your contributions have always reflected your profound understanding of the history and foundations of both probability and statistics.

In the classroom, you have been a trailblazer in the field of statistical data analysis, teaching Yale students with your own interactive computer package many years before such packages came to live on everyone’s PC. Through your foresight and hard work you created the Social Sciences Statistical Laboratory, serving as its first director, still a vital part of the statistical teaching in many departments. Along the way you supervised 40 dissertations, served three times as Chairman of Statistics, and once as Chair of both Statistics and Philosophy (at the same time!), and led the follow-up to the Tobin Committee known as “The Hartigan Committee,” all the while still managing to do such things as serve as the Chairman of a National Research Council Committee, and of The Classification Society of North America, and as one of the founding editors of the journal Statistical Science.

All of these are the facts. But none convey the flavor of the inimitable Hartigan! Your personality is a most extraordinary blend of brain and heart. You have a skeptical no nonsense way of cutting to the heart of a matter and expressing yourself firmly on it—at the same time that you never lose sight of the feelings of the ordinary bloke standing before you. Your name itself can strike fear into people’s hearts—there was an occasion in a lawsuit when the very mention of your presence impelled the other side to withdraw its statistics expert—but this intimidating side is only for strangers. At 24 Hillhouse, where you have been the heart and soul of the place, you are admired and beloved by your students and your colleagues, whom you have inspired, encouraged, and guided. You are renowned for your sense of humor, your generosity, your unselfish sharing of your wisdom and time, and your compassion. You are in the words of one of your students, “the giving tree.”

Once asked in an interview if you enjoyed being at Yale you responded thusly: “I have been on a lot of committees at Yale and have found the other people on the committees often to be very interesting people to talk to, even though they might not know any calculus. They are very persuasive. They listen to arguments. They produce correct counter arguments. It’s good arguing with them, and I like that.” All of your colleagues at Yale, even those who, alas, don’t know sufficient amounts about Calculus, like arguing with you too, John Hartigan, and wish you and ourselves many more years of doing just that.

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans