Peter Reinhard Hansen, Tze Leung Lai, and Raja Velu
Ted Anderson, a past vice president of the ASA, turned 90 in June of 2008. To celebrate the occasion, the statistics and economics departments at Stanford University organized a conference from June 6–7, 2008.
Anderson’s contributions to statistics and economics are well known. The Collected Papers of T. W. Anderson covers a span of his work up to 1985. He has published more than 70 papers since then.
Invited speakers, in presenting their research, pointed out Anderson’s fundamental contributions and the over-arching influence of his early work. Kenneth Arrow, 1972 Nobel laureate in economics, gave an overview of the early developments in econometrics during his talk, “Some Reminiscences of Econometrics in the 1940s,” and profiled Anderson’s contributions to econometrics while he was a member of the Cowles Commission.
The list of conference speakers included many of his former students, coauthors, and colleagues. Anderson was always in attendance, adding details about historical facts to many of the presentations. His comments were crisp and right to the point, as seen in his interviews with Morris DeGroot for Statistical Science and Peter Phillips for Econometric Theory, both published in 1986.
The banquet held on the first day of the conference was a success. More than 100 guests—including Anderson’s wife, Dorothy, and their children—attended. Several people expressed their personal gratitude to the Andersons for their mentoring and hospitality.
Anderson’s 1945 doctoral dissertation was scanned for the occasion and made available as a PDF file at Anderson’s department of statisics home page. Its effect on econometrics and multivariate analysis was noted by several speakers, and the scanned version was unveiled to Anderson on the second day of the conference. During the concluding session that day, a special issue (Vol. 138, No. 9) of the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, edited in Anderson’s honor, was presented to him by J. N. Srivastava, editor-in-chief of the journal.
Click here for more information about the conference.