In Conversation

John Anthony Hartigan was born on July 2, 1937 in Sydney, Australia. He attended the University of Sydney, earning a B.Sc. degree in mathematics in 1959 and an M.Sc. degree in mathematics the following year. In 1960 John moved to Princeton where he studied for his Ph.D. in statistics under the guidance of John Tukey and Frank Anscombe. He completed his Ph.D. in 1962, and worked as an Instructor at Princeton in 1962–1963, and as a visiting lecturer at the Cambridge Statistical Laboratory in 1963–1964. In 1964 he joined the faculty at Princeton. He moved to Yale as Associate Professor with tenure in 1969, became a Professor in 1972 and, in 1983, became Eugene Higgins Professor of Statistics at Yale—a position previously held by Jimmie Savage. He served as Chairman of the Statistics Department at Yale from 1973 to 1975 and again from 1988 to 1994. John was instrumental in the establishment of the Social Sciences Statistical Laboratory at Yale and served as its Director from 1985 to 1989 and again from 1991 to 1993. He served as Chairman of the National Research Council Committee on the General Aptitude Test Battery from 1987 to 1990. John’s research interests cover the foundations of probability and statistics, classification, clustering, Bayes methods and statistical computing. He has published over 80 journal papers and two books: Clustering Algorithms in 1975 andBayes Theory in 1983. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He served as President of the Classification Society from 1978 to 1980 and as Editor of Statistical Science from 1984 to 1987. John married Pamela Harvey in 1960. They have three daughters and three grandchildren. This interview was recorded in John’s office at Yale on August 15th, 2002. The following day more than 30 of John’s former Ph.D. students—from all over the United States and from as far away as Japan—arrived in New Haven for a special celebration to mark John’s 65th birthday. Readers unfamiliar with John’s sense of humor should be warned of his tendency to support his arguments by outrageous and over-the-top statements, most of which are delivered with tremendous energy and accompanied by mischievous laughter. I have attempted to retain in the text as much of that side of