Montevideo

It all started when my Uruguayan friend Rafael Laguardia approached me at the Cambridge Congress (I knew him quite well several years before at Brown and at Princeton) and asked whom I would rec ommend, and specifically what statistician I would recommend, as visit ing professor at Montevideo for a year. Without a moment’s hesitation I said “me”. He took my answer for the half joke that it was, laughed good-naturedly, and asked whether I considered myself a statistician. I allowed as how not exactly, but I had published two or three papers on statistics, did have some idea of what probability was about, and, be sides, I was really interested in going to Uruguay. This last qualification, which, it appears, I was the only one in the United States to possess, was what impressed him the most. He liked me pretty well and wanted to have me visit—the trouble was that he could persuade his deans to allocate money for a visiting professorship only under the guise of doing something practical. I gave him the names of a couple of young statisticians as a back-up, and we parted with the idea that may be, who knows.…