Subject: To students in Ma 2b and Ma 112b

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 16:13:08 -0800 (PST)

Through the magic of REGIS, I am writing to let you know about
a special lecture about statistics, given by one of the best 
statisticians-- and best lecturers-- in the history of the subject.

Brad Efron is a professor of statistics at Stanford, famous for 
inventing "the bootstrap" and for various other things, including 
being a great president of Ricketts House in 1960.  His talk is

"Baseball, Shakespeare, and Modern Statistical Theory"
201 Bridge
4:15  Tuesday, January 30th.

It requires no background, just a little familiarity with probability 
theory, and it's about which "school" of statistics scientists and 
engineers ought to use-- "Bayes vs. non=Bayes"-- and how 
about  "empirical Bayes"?   Brad uses colorful examples and 
pictures rather than formulas, and his talk is so non-technical 
that he was able to give it as a featured lecture at the annual 
"joint meetings" of the mathematical societies a few weeks ago.  
(Mathematicians know less about statistics than you do!)

The lecture is sponsored by the math department-- the annual 
DePrima Memorial Lecture, which is supposed to be mainly for 
undergraduates, though in the last fifteen years we have 
attracted a good number of Caltech faculty who are happy to be 
able to hear a math lecture they can actuallly understand.

It's listed on the math department web site at

http://math.caltech.edu/events/07deprima.html

Ma 112 students will learn more about Bayes methods
than we just covered in class.

Ma 2 students will get a glimpse of some interesting examples
of statistics-- and a fun lecture (for a change).  We'll take
up Brad's topics near the end of the term.

Hope to see you there on Tuesday!

G.L.