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38 A career in statisticsA trip to a modern factory in Italy during my sabbatical gave me the impressionthat automation still had far to go, and the study of pattern recognitionand cluster analysis could be useful. There are many methods availablefor clustering, but it seemed that an appropriate method should depend onthe nature of the data. This raised the problem of how to observe multidimensionaldata. It occurred to me that presenting each n-dimensional datapoint by a cartoon of a face, where each of the components of the data pointcontrolled a feature of the face, might be effective in some cases. A presentationof this idea with a couple of examples was received enthusiastically bythe audience, many of whom went home and wrote their own version of whatare popularly called “Chernoff faces.” This took place at a time when thecomputer was just about ready to handle the technology, and I am reasonablysure that if I had not done it, someone else would soon have thought of theidea. Apparently I was lucky in having thought of using caricatures of faces,because faces are processed in the brain differently than other visual objectsand caricatures have a larger impact than real faces; see Chernoff (1973).3.4 MIT and HarvardAt the age of 50, I decided to leave Stanford and start a statistics program atMIT in the Applied Mathematics Section of the Mathematics Department. Forseveral years, we had a vital but small group, but the School of Science was nota healthy place for recognizing and promoting excellent applied statisticians,and so I retired from MIT to accept a position at Harvard University, fromwhich I retired in 1997, but where I have an office that I visit regularly eventhough they don’t pay me.I am currently involved in a collaboration with Professor Shaw-Hwa Loat Columbia University, who was inspired by a seminar course I offered atHarvard on statistical issues in molecular biology. We have been working onvariable selection methods for large data sets with applications to biology andmedicine; see Chernoff (2009).In review, I feel that I lacked some of the abilities that are important foran applied statistician who has to handle problems on a daily basis. I lackedthe library of rough and ready techniques to produce usable results. However,I found that dealing with real applied problems, no matter how unimportant,without this library, required serious consideration of the issues and was oftena source of theoretical insight and innovation.