PITT'S DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS CELEBRATES FIRST ANNIVERSARY

PITTSBURGH, Mar. 25 -- The Department of Statistics at the University of Pittsburgh will celebrate its first anniversary with a symposium featuring talks by internationally renowned statisticians. The event kicks off Friday, Mar. 27 at 4 p.m. in the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium with a lecture by C. Radhakrishna Rao, professor of statistics at Penn State University and adjunct professor of statistics at Pitt.

The symposium will continue Saturday, Mar. 28 with a day of talks by such preeminent statisticians as Ingram Olkin of Stanford University and Jerome Sacks of the National Institute of Statistical Science, as well as distinguished alumni of the University of Pittsburgh.

"We're very excited to be celebrating our first year as an independent department with some of the most famous statisticians in the world," said statistics department chair Allan Sampson. "This is an exciting event, nationally recognizing the importance of statistical science and education and of the significance of starting a new department here at Pitt."

Statistics is becoming an absolutely necessary science, partnered with all the other sciences, in the information age. "As an example, many public health research projects generate mountains of data," said Sampson. "That can require teams of statisticians, collaborating with the researchers, in order to understand what all the data mean."

In any given year, approximately 20 percent of the undergraduate students at Pitt are taking some kind of statistics course, and estimates show that as many as 70 percent of undergrads will take at least one statistics course. "This is the first new department in the College of Arts and Sciences in more that a dozen years," said Sampson. "It's an important statement for the future of statistics at Pitt. We look forward to the future in a field that enjoys explosive growth and a terrific job market. There are routinely more jobs than graduates in statistics."

The symposium will close with a banquet the evening of Mar. 28, at 6:30 p.m. at the Pitt Club. For more information on the symposium see the Department of Statistics website at http://www.stat.pitt.edu or call 624-8368.

-30-