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Professor Joe Gani was interviewed in 2008 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Gani's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers his work in founding the Journal of Applied Probability. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Joseph Gani was born in 1924, in Cairo, Egypt. His early schooling took place in Egypt and Japan in a variety of languages. He studied at Imperial College, London, and earned a BSc (Hons) in 1947 and a DIC in 1948. He obtained a PhD in statistics from the Australian National University (ANU) in 1955. In 1970 he was awarded a DSc from London University.
Gani moved to Australia in 1948 and worked as a lecturer in applied mathematics at the University of Melbourne from 1948 to 1950. From 1953 to 1960 he was associated with the University of Western Australia. During this time he travelled, studied and worked in a number of locations – Canberra on a Commonwealth postgraduate scholarship for his PhD, Manchester on a Nuffield Fellowship and New York as an associate professor.
In 1961 Gani became a senior fellow in statistics at the ANU, where he stayed until 1964. For the next ten years he worked overseas, initially at the University of Michigan, USA, and subsequently, and primarily, as the first professor in probability and statistics at the University of Sheffield and as the founder of the Applied Probability Trust and editor of the Journal of Applied Probability.
Gani returned to Australia in 1974 as chief of the CSIRO Division of Mathematic and Statistics. In 1981 he departed CSIRO and Australia again, this time to go to the USA. There, he was professor of statistics at the University of Kentucky (1981–85) and professor of statistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1985–94). In 1994 he retired and returned to Canberra as a visiting fellow to the School of Mathematical Sciences at ANU.
His research areas over the years have included applied probability and statistics, epidemic modelling, biological models, statistical linguistics and inference on stochastic processes.
Gani has received many Australian, overseas and international honours including the Pitman Medal of the Statistical Society of Australia (1994). The International Conference on Applied Probability and Time Series was held in honour of Gani and the late EJ Hannan (1995). He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2000 and received the Australia Centenary Medal in 2001.
Gani was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1976.
Birth of the Journal of Applied Probability
You went back for a while to the ANU.
Yes. I was building up the department in Western Australia, and invited both Pat Moran and Ted Hannan to visit. When Pat Moran saw that I was building up the department he thought it would be nice to get me to help build up the department at the ANU, so he offered me a job there as a senior fellow. Somewhat reluctantly, I left Western Australia at the end of 1960 to come to the ANU. The department flourished – Joe Moyal joined, Pat Moran was there, and I think Geoff Watson was there for a while before he left to go to Toronto. Ted Hannan was at the School of General Studies, and there was very close collaboration between his department and Pat's. In a sense, we felt like one group.
At ANU did you continue your research?
Yes, and I helped Pat build up the department. I think I was influential in getting Peter Finch to join.
In about 1962 I got some study leave, and Ruth and I went to Britain. I was offered space at University College, London, where Maurice Bartlett had become the professor. He was helpful as usual, and also I met Toby Lewis and we became good friends. I did some work on epidemic theory while there.
In Britain I took the opportunity of sounding out a variety of colleagues about the possible creation of a journal of applied probability. Pat Moran, myself and others working on applied probability problems were having some difficulty in getting papers published. Applied probability lies between statistics and theoretical probability, being the application of probabilistic methods to real-life problems. If you wrote a paper in it, you'd send the paper to Biometrika, the recognised statistical journal, and they'd send back a polite letter saying, ‘Too much probability. We're a statistical journal.' You would then send the paper to the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, who took exactly the opposite tack, ‘This has got too much statistics. We can't publish it.' So I thought we should have a journal in applied probability.
At that time there were two journals publishing probability in general, the German Zeitschrift für Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie and the Russian Teoriya Veroyatnostei. They both published papers verging on the applications, but they were mostly theoretical probability. So I did some homework. I went through Mathematical Reviews to see how many papers could be classified as applied probability, and it looked pretty obvious that there were enough papers to feed a journal which specialised in that area. I sounded out my colleagues and many of them were very enthusiastic. I enlisted the help of such people as Ted Hannan and Pat Moran, who agreed to join as associate editors if I was able to launch it.
Focus questions
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
applied probability
probability
statistics
theoretical probability
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