Nancy L. Geller, 2011 ASA President
Paul Meier’s life was celebrated by family, friends, and colleagues during a memorial on November 20, 2011, at the Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York City. I attended, both to represent the ASA and to pay my personal respects because I knew Paul from his clinical trials work with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Paul passed away on August 7, 2011, at age 87. He was best known for the Kaplan-Meier estimator, which was published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1958. This paper—one of the top-five most-referenced papers in the sciences—is unusual in that the two authors did not work together, but submitted independent papers that the editor convinced them to merge.
Paul also was known as a proponent of rigorous evaluation of new medical treatments via randomized clinical trials.
Many members of his family participated in the memorial, including his three daughters, a son-in-law, nieces, and grandchildren—all of whom spoke eloquently of Paul’s personal life. Paul’s love of chocolate, ice cream, and stilton cheese were apparently infectious! Aside from these (and family and statistics), Paul loved music. I had not known Paul played the flute and piano and took up the guitar in his later years. The proceedings were punctuated by music, ranging from a memorial hymn to a Telemann Sonata for two flutes to three folk songs in which we all were invited to join in.
A number of former colleagues spoke: Steve Stigler, Ted Karrison, Rick Chapell, Shaw Hwa Lo, Sandy Zabell, and Peter McCullagh. They reminded us that Paul was a wonderful extemporaneous speaker and that he shaped both the theory and practice of medical statistics through his leadership as chair at both The University of Chicago and Columbia University. His medical colleagues, Rima McLeod, a pediatrician, and Rebecca Smith, an AIDS researcher, spoke of Paul’s idealism and desire to serve humanity via his clinical trials work. Several from the audience spoke spontaneously, including a college classmate from Oberlin.
The memorial was a beautiful and touching tribute to a statistical colleague who left a profound mark on our profession. To paraphrase the hymn that opened the occasion, “His memory keeps shining Ever brightly though his time with us is done.”
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