Dennis K. Pearl

摘要

That would be 1969.1 was a sophomore at Berkeley, protesting the Vietnam War and discovering I was no longer the smartest guy in the class like I was used to being in high school. I had a terrific AP calculus teacher in high school and figured I'd be a math major, go on to graduate school, and become a math professor. Unfortunately, I had a pretty boring instructor in my linear algebra class at Berkeley, and the same guy was going to teach the next course in the series, so I decided to shop for something else. My brother was a senior there and convinced me to take an introductory statistics class with him taught by Erich Lehmann. By the second week, I was hooked! My math classes were about understanding elegance, while statistics was about understanding evidence, and it just seemed the world needed more people who could do the latter.