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Indiana University Bloomington

Bernhard Flury Memorial Lectures

BernardFlury

Professor Bernhard Flury, an applied statistician, was on the faculty in the Department of Mathematics at IU's Bloomington campus for more than ten years, starting in 1987. He did research in Multivariate Analysis and was a popular teacher of courses in statistics. For several years he was the director of the Statistical Consulting Center. He was killed by a rockslide while hiking in the Italian Alps in the summer of 1999. At the initiative of his wife Leah, as well as Professor Walter Gautschi (of Purdue University) and several other people, a fund was established in the Mathematics Department to fund a series of lectures in his memory. The first Bernhard Flury Memorial Lecture was given in the spring of 2004 by Professor Jim Schott of the University of Central Florida. Professor Ben Boukai of IUPUI gave the second lecture in 2006. The Department of Statistics began hosting this lecture alternately with The Department of Mathematics in 2007.




Please join us for the 2011 Bernhard Flury Memorial Lecture.
 


PAST Flury Lectures
Flury Lecture - Darwin, Galton, and Pearson: The Rule of Three and the Beginning of Multivariate Analysis
March 10, 2011 - Swain East 140
4:00 pm

Stephen Stigler - Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago Department of Statistics

True multivariate statistical analysis was born at 10:00 on the morning of Thursday, September 10, 1885. Its origin and adoption over the next half-century required the rejection of a mode of mathematical thought that had dominated science for two thousand years. The theory stands as an achievement no less than those of Darwin in evolution and Einstein in relativity. Previous historical accounts have misconstrued the fundamental but subtle nature of the change that took place. All of this will be cleared up and the implications (ranging from the philosophy of inference to predicting the results of the NCAA Tournament) briefly discussed, with a minimum of formal mathematics.


Stephen Stigler is Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Chicago. His research focuses on the statistical theory of robust estimators and the history of statistics. He has authored two books, "The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900" and "Statistics on the Table: The History ofStatistical Concepts and Methods" as well as numerous articles (e.g., "Who discovered Bayes Theorem?", Amer Statistician 1983). Such instances of scientific discoveries being named after someone other ethan their original discovers led to "Stigler's Law of Eponomy." Professor Stigler received his Ph.D. from Berkeley, became Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been at University of Chicago since 1979. He is a Fellow of ASA, IMS, and AAAS, and was Editor of JASA, President of IMS and ISI, and served on the crucial National Academies Committee on the Forensic Use of DNA. Titles of some of his papers include: "Poisson on the Poisson Distribution" (Stat & Prob Letters, 1982), "R.H. Smith: A Victorian Interested in Robustness" (Biometrika 1980), "Laplace's 1774 Memoir on Inverse Probability" (Statistical Science 1986), and "The Bernouillis of Basel" (J. Econometrics 1996). He is legendary for giving fascinating lectures.



Flury Lecture - A Statistician Looks At Uncertainty
March 03, 2009 -

David Scott - Noah Harding Professor of Statistics, Rice University

Modern science relies on ever more complex models to understand data. Presenting the confidence of model predictions is a grand challenge. Faced with potentially hundreds or thousands of parameters, scientists often perform sensitivity analyses in order to assess the robustness of model predictions.

Such one-at-a-time calculations are useful but limited. Visualization techniques can provide a fuller picture, but the availability of immersive technologies is still expensive and not commonplace. We examine some simple data and discuss the presentation of uncertainty. Avenues for research are described.
Flury Lecture - Current and Future Frontiers in Statistics
March 27, 2008 - RH 100 10am
Professor Peter Hall, University of Melbourne

The availability of powerful computing equipment has had a dramatic impact on statistical methods and thinking, changing forever the way data are analysed. New data types, larger quantities of data, and new classes of research problem are all motivating new statistical methods. We shall give examples of each of these issues, and discuss the current and future directions of frontier problems in statistics.
Flury Lecture - Statistical Analysis of Bullet Lead Compositions as Forensic Evidence
March 08, 2007 - RH 100 4pm
Professor Karen Kafadar of the University of Colorado - Denver & Health Sciences Center

Since the 1960s, the FBI has performed Compositional Analysis of Bullet Lead (CABL), a forensic technique that compares the elemental composition of bullets found at a crime scene to that of bullets found in a suspect's possession. CABL has been used when no gun is recovered, or when bullets are too small or fragmented to compare striations on the casings with those on the gun barrel. The National Academy of Sciences formed a Committee charged with the assessment of CABL's scientific validity. The report, ``Forensic Analysis: Weighing Bullet Lead Evidence'' (National Research Council, 2004), included discussions on the effects of the manufacturing process on the validity of the comparisons, the precision and accuracy of the chemical measurement technique, and the statistical methodology used to compare two bullets and test for a ``match''.

This talk will focus on the statistical analysis: the FBI's methods of testing for a ``match'', the apparent false positive and false negative rates, the FBI's clustering algorithm (``chaining''), and the Committee's recommendations. Additional analyses on data later made available, the use of forensic evidence in general, also will be discussed.