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P.G. Hall 15915.2 Living with change15.2.1 The diversification of statisticsJust a few years ago I had a conversation with a colleague who expressed graveconcern for the future of statistics. He saw it being taken over by, or subsumedinto, fields as diverse and disparate as computer science and bioinformatics,to name only two. He was worried, and wondered what we could do to stopthe trend.Similar disquiet has been articulated by others, and not just recently. Theeminent British statistician D.J. Finney expressed apprehensions similar tothose of my colleague, although at a time when my colleague had not detectedmuch that was perceptibly wrong. Writing in the newsletter of the RoyalStatistical Society (RSS News) in2000,ProfessorFinneyarguedthat:“... professional statisticians may be losing control of — perhaps evenlosing concern for — what is done in the name of our discipline. I began[this article] by asking ‘Whither... [statistics]?’ My answer is ‘Downhill!’Any road back will be long and tortuous, but unless we find it wefail to keep faith with the lead that giants gave us 75 years ago.”I’m not sure whether it is pragmatism or optimism that keeps me from worryingabout these issues — pragmatism because, even if these portents ofcalamity were well founded, there would not be much that we could do aboutthem, short of pretending we had the powers of Cnut the Great and commandingthe tide of statistical change to halt; or optimism, on the groundsthat these changes are actually healthy, and more likely to enrich statisticsthan destroy it.In 1986 the UCLA historian Theodore Porter wrote that:“Statistics has become known in the twentieth century as the mathematicaltool for analysing experimental and observational data. Enshrinedby public policy as the only reliable basis for judgements suchas the efficacy of medical procedures or the safety of chemicals, andadopted by business for such uses as industrial quality control, it isevidently among the products of science whose influence on public andprivate life has been most pervasive.”The years since then have only deepened the involvement of statistics in science,technology, social science and culture, so that Porter’s comments aboutthe 20th Century apply with even greater force in the early 21st. Hal Varian’sfamous remark in The McKinsey Quarterly, inJanuary2009,that“thesexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians,” augments and reinforcesPorter’s words almost 30 years ago. Statistics continues to be vibrant andvital, I think because of, not despite, being in a constant state of change.