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Richard (Dick) De Veaux’s Amazing Balancing Acts

1 February 2015 3,085 views 3 Comments
Amy Munice, ALM Communications
    Dick De Veaux

    Dick De Veaux

    Dick De Veaux may be the only ASA Board member who jokingly sighs about the sadness of “losing his baritone to tenure.”

    No, he’s not referring to his time as “Statistician to the Grateful Dead”—a true, if unusual, credit on his rather long statistical consulting résumé. Rather, it was the end of his Williams College doo-wop band, “The Diminished Faculty,” a fun run of six years that helped De Veaux find the right brain/left brain balance he seemingly craves.

    That right brain/left brain balancing hunger also probably makes him the only ASA Board member who wore tights for a living. De Veaux was a professional modern dancer for four years, a career he might have pursued if his back and bank account had held out longer and his thirst for math had not brought him back into the fold.

    At first, dance was attractive to De Veaux largely because it was so statistics-not. He recounts:

    I first started dancing when I was 23 years old and studying for my PhD orals, an age nobody recommends as the starting point for dancing. I wasn’t trying to be a professional dancer. I just wanted to stop thinking about statistical theories. I had tried everything I could think of to stop the statistical thoughts—yoga, meditation, swimming. Dance worked! For an hour and a half, I didn’t think about anything except which foot to put where. I got very excited and within a couple of months I was taking eight to nine hours of classes every day—three modern dance and three ballet. I was also biking about 200 miles a week to get there.

    At the same time, though, I was doing consulting and also learning programming while I was a statistical consultant at the Palo Alto Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. The only problem was that not much was happening to get my dissertation done. In the midst of this, I decided to audition for a dance company led by Tandy Beal, and I got in. It was a perfect fit because we only worked for three months—performing at colleges, teaching master classes, and we’d finish the season with a big performance in San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. But this gave me the bug, and I knew I wanted to pursue a career as a dancer.

    It was no lack of fortune that De Veaux’s advisor at Stanford, Persi Diaconis, was also a man of many talents. He had been a magician until the age of 24, when he became bored with performing and, in rapid order, became a leading statistician and joined the Stanford faculty. When De Veaux told Diaconis about his dancing career, Diaconis wished him luck but also, with great perspicacity, made sure to mention that if performing didn’t quite work out, the door back into statistics would be open.

    That day came. De Veaux said, “I’m a firm believer in left brain/right brain balance. Dance is a little like baseball in that ability has very little correlation with intelligence. You meet all sorts of interesting people, but after only a few months on tour, I was starved for more left-brain activity. I started reading bridge columns and doing crossword puzzles during the long van rides between gigs. In the end, I was very satisfied when I went back into statistics.”

    With the same energy he poured into dancing, De Veaux has amassed a mountain of professional achievements since he earned his PhD in statistics from Stanford in 1986. He has had 26 consulting clients—or 27 if you count the Grateful Dead—including Cardinal Health, American Express, Hewlett-Packard, Alcoa, and other Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies. His teaching credits include stints at Williams College, Princeton University, Université Réné Descartes, and The Wharton School. He is the coauthor of five statistics textbooks, with a new one, Modern Statistics and Probability for Scientists and Engineers, in the works. He has penned dozens of articles in juried journals and conference proceedings and authored 15 additional articles in un-refereed outlets. And he holds two patents.

    De Veaux at Stanford with his wife (in white) Sylvia Logan (Stanford ’78)

    De Veaux at Stanford with his wife (in white) Sylvia Logan (Stanford ’78)

    In the midst of achieving this long list of professional credits, De Veaux married fellow dancer Sylvia Logan (he jokes he was thrilled to be the one straight guy in her dance class at Stanford). The two danced together professionally in Utah and, later, Philadelphia. De Veaux then went back to statistics full time, while Sylvia continued dancing professionally with the Jennifer Muller and The Works Company until 1989. She then retired to help raise their four children: Nick (25), Scyrine (23), Frederick (21), and Alexandra (19).

    But to get a good picture of whole-brained Dick De Veaux, you have to keep track—as he did and does—of nurturing his right-brain activity. Until three years ago, he also taught dance at Williams College during the school’s three-week Winter Study Course. Soon after arriving there, he found three faculty members who also loved doo-wop, giving his performer-at-heart an outlet until the aforementioned loss of his baritone to tenure at another college.

    He has been taking voice lessons and singing classically for 30 years. The three times he has stayed in Paris, he has performed with the Choeur Vittoria, including performance tours as far away as Morocco and Senegal. Even when he is working and living in Williamstown, he sings with the University Chorus and devotes 7–10 hours a week to singing.

    De Veaux will tell you that teaching statistics is also an outlet for him, as a born performer. After recounting his dance and musical credits, he recounted:

    Teaching seems to be a need of mine. My parents tell the story of how I began teaching at the age of four. Like many of my colleagues, I was quite mathematical at an early age, but none of my friends knew how to count or what cards were or how to play with them. I had started playing poker and, since I wanted poker buddies, I had to start by teaching them to count.

    I just love to teach. I’m passionate about statistics, itself, as a subject and getting people excited about it, in part, taps into my need to perform.

    I also love the statistical consulting I do. Yes, being asked to help out Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead was no doubt my wackiest gig, but they all are interesting. Every problem has its wrinkles and interests. I love problem solving and also talking to people about their problems. I think it’s where my true talent lies. I’m really a business therapist. I ask my clients about their problems and I help them solve them, usually by starting out and asking many questions. After a while, we come up with a plan of attack for figuring out how to get at the root of their problem. Often, it’s an experimental design to collect the right data or a more involved data analysis that will help them.

    Consulting is half teaching and half therapy. The mistake many younger statisticians make is they want to immediately solve the problem by cramming it into something that they know how to solve. That never works. Therapists don’t work that way. You have to listen. Don’t try to reduce the problem to mathematics or statistics too quickly because there are always other issues. What you thought was the problem might turn out only to be part of a much larger scenario.

    De Veaux’s advice to younger statisticians? He says, “Get your hands dirty as often as you can. Plunge into a problem with a big data set. That’s the place to get the experience. This is an amazing time to be a statistician. We are in the news, we are hot, and we are in demand. This is the time to capitalize on that.”

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    3 Comments »

    • Evi said:

      Wonderful story and gorgeous photo!

    • Veronica Czitrom said:

      Congratulations, Dick! Sounds like fun. I guess I also use the left and right sides of my brain, by being a statistician who enjoys dancing and writing (I wrote an award-winning family history book, where I used my academic research skills to look for information). I think it’s my creative right brain that allows me to do easily understandable graphical analysis of DOEs using JMP that engineers love and understand, and which demonstrates statistical properties like orthogonality and hidden replication, in a way that I haven’t seen others do. Regards, Veronica