Howard Wainer

Editor’s note: This interview originally appeared in CHANCE Volume 20, Issue 4.

HW: So where did the idea for CHANCE come from?

SEF: In the early 1980s, I was an editor for the Springer Series in Statistics, and our in-house editor was a wonderful mathematician, Walter Kaufmann-Buhler, who managed almost all of mathematics and other areas for Springer. Walter was very excited about a magazine called the Mathematical Intelligencer, which Springer published out of Germany at the time. He asked if there would be a market for something similar in statistics. My initial reaction was that the Intelligencer was too mathematical and could only be read by mathematicians. What statistics needed was a publication about statistics that could be read by statisticians and others.

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