The Science of Bradley Efron

Nature didn’t design human beings to be statisticians, and in fact our minds are more naturally attuned to spotting the saber-toothed tiger than seeing the jungle he springs from. Yet scienti?c discovery in practice is often more jungle than tiger. Those of us who devote our scienti?c lives to the deep and satisfying subject of statistical inference usually do so in the face of a certain under-appreciation from the public, and also (though less so these days) from the wider scienti?c world. With this in mind, it feels very nice to be over-appreciated for a while, even at the expense of weathering a 70th birthday. (Are we certain that some terrible chronological error hasn’t been made?) Carl Morris and Rob Tibshirani, the two colleagues I’ve worked most closely with, both ?t my ideal pro?le of the statistician as a mathematical scientist working seamlessly across wide areas of theory and application. They seem to have chosen the papers here in the same catholic spirit, and then cajoled an all-star cast of statistical savants to comment on them.