Colloquium for Mike Titterington

The colloquium held today at Glasgow University in honour of Mike Titterington for his retiral was highly enjoyable! First, it was a pleasure to celebrate Mike’s achievements at this (early) stage of his career, along with people from Glasgow but also from all over the UK and even from Australia, among whom a lot of friends. Second, the (other) talks were highly interesting, with Peter Hall talking about the asymptotics of records, Byron Morgan about identifiability in capture-recapture models, Peter Green presenting a graphical diagnostic for spotting divergence between prior and likelihood in multivariate models, and Adrian Bowman illustrating advanced face analysis using principal curves on lips and faces. Third, I got a fair amount of questions and comments about ABC in general and ABC model choice in particular, including David Cox commenting that ABC was an important new topic and suggesting using goodness-of-fit tools for model comparison. The symposium per se ended up with a specially designed cake covering (in sugar!) some of Mike’s academic endeavours during the past years. While a formal affair for which I had to run to get a shirt, the diner was equally enjoyable, including a simultaneously witty and deep after-dinner talk paying tribute to Mike’s contributions by David Cox (who was Mike’s predecessor as editor of Biometrika) and a funny conclusion by John McColl who dug out a 1976 probability assignment he had from Mike that was the Monty Hall problem.

The next celebration of that kind I am taking part in is Hans Künsch’s 60th birthday in Zürich next October. Looking forward to it!