Remembrance of Things Past

There are a great many ways by which a scholar may come to choose his field of study. The story-book account where a man sees some great human need and devotes his life to providing for it is probably rarely true, and could hardly be true for a statistician. Who would believe a man who claimed to have been seized by a passionate desire to relieve human suffering through the provision of good methods of summarizing data? Some pure mathematicians believe that statisticians are failed mathematicians, and there is a grain of truth in this. However this is basically a superficial judgement, for science calls for different combinations of abilities and men naturally move to those fields best suited to their nature. Not an uncommon progression would be from the more abstract to the more concrete, because it is when we are young that we are most idealistic and only later that we begin to perceive how incredibly difficult it is to achieve anything worthwhile in a very theoretical way. To be a good statistician certainly requires some mathematical ability, but it also requires other qualities.