Irving John Good was born in London on December 9, 1916. He attended the Haberdashers' "secondary" School, distinguishing himself as a mathematical prodigy, and then entered Jesus College at Cambridge University in 1935. He studied under G. H. Hardy and A. S. Besicovitch, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1941, and was the Cambridgeshire chess champion in 1939. Then he was called into World War II service as a cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park, working partly as the main statistician in teams led by Alan Turing and, later, by the British chess champion C. H. O'D. Alexander and by M. H. A. Newman. The work employed early electromagnetic and electronic computers and applied Bayesian statistics relevant to reading the two main secret ciphers used by the German Army and Navy, providing crucial intelligence to the Allies. After the war, Good taught briefly at Manchester University and made a few suggestions for the electronic computer project. He was then drawn back into classified work for the British government. During that time he obtained an Sc.D. from Cambridge and a D.Sc. from Oxford. In 1967 he came to the United States, becoming a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Officially he retired in 1994, but in practice he can be found at work late in the day when the snow isn't deep.

This paper reviews R. A. Fisher's many fundamental contributions to multivariate statistical analysis--from the derivation of the distribution of the sample correlation coefficient to discriminant analysis. The emphasis here is on the conceptual and mathematical development. All of his papers on multivariate analysis will be included in this survey.

Recent work has extended the methods for the analysis of nested case-control studies to accomodate a broad variety of risk set sampling designs. These results have implications for the design of sampled epidemiologic cohort studies. We describe a model which is a natural extension of the Cox proportional hazards model and may be used to estimate parameters from sampled risk set data. We illustrate how these techniques may be used to solve three diverse design and analysis problems from epidemiologic research.

The original paper by Michael Evans and Tim Swartz appeared in the August 1995 issue of Statistical Science (10 254-272.) Due to a publication error the following discussion of the paper was not included in that issue.

Leslie Kish was born in Poprad, Hungary in 1910. He arrived with his family in the United States in 1926 with an English vocabulary of approximately 300 words. Within a year, his father died and Leslie became the principal wage earner in a five-person household. By 1929 he had secured full-time employment as a lab assistant at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. One year later he finished Bay Ridge Evening High School and enrolled in the College of the City of New York evening program. He became a U.S. citizen in 1936.

In 1937, with less than one college year left, Kish joined the International Brigades and went to Spain to fight for the Loyalists. He returned to the United States in 1939, and that same year received a B.S. in mathematics, cum laude, from the College of the City of New York.

Leslie Kish was hired by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in 1940 and in 1941 moved to the Division of Program Surveys of the Department of Agriculture. From 1942 to 1945 he served as a meteorologist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. After the war he returned to the Department of Agriculture, but in 1947 moved to the University of Michigan as a member of the newly created Survey Research Center, which became the Institute for Social Research. While working full time, Kish received an M.A. in mathematical statistics in 1948 and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1952. He became a lecturer at the University of Michigan in 1951, an Associate Professor in 1956, a professor in 1960 and professor emeritus in 1981.

Kish is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He served as President of the American Statistical Association in 1977. He was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1980 and was named Honorary Fellow of the International Statistical Institute in 1994. In 1988, Kish received an Honorary Doctorate in statistics from the University of Bologna (900th anniversary) and in 1995 was elected an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

In addition to his pioneering work in the theory and practice of survey sampling, Kish has been responsible for the training of hundreds of practicing sampling statisticians in the United States and in more than 90 other countries.

The following conversation took place at Leslie Kish's home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on July 22-23, 1994.