Recollections of a Random Variable

Abstract

When the editors originally invited me to contribute to this volume, my first reaction was to decline. I could not imagine that my revolutionary activities would be of interest of anyone but my nearest and dearest. In any event, my personal involvement in the ‘quantitative revolution’ was that of a humble street fighter rather than as one of that select band who found glory manning the barricades or storming the bastions of traditional geography with their latest numerical weapons. In fact I do not regard myself as a ‘quantifier’, except in the obvious sense of having found some use for statistical and numerical methods in my research. And what use I did make (correctly or otherwise) has no claim to originality. Indeed, if there is anything to distinguish my one book-length excursion into numerical methods from others in this field, it is its lack of sophistication and its tendency to gloss over those finer points of probability theory and the derivation of equations so beloved of real quantifiers.