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6Statistics before and after my COPSS PrizePeter J. BickelDepartment of StatisticsUniversity of California, Berkeley, CAThis is largely an account of my research career, the development of differentinterests as I moved along, and the influences, people and ideas that determinedthem. It also gives an idiosyncratic view of the development of the fieldand ends with some words of advice.6.1 IntroductionI was fortunate enough to be young enough to receive the first COPSS prize in1979. It was a fairly rushed affair. I flew back from France where I was givingsome lectures, mumbled that I felt like the robber in a cops and robbers dramasince I didn’t feel I had done enough to deserve the prize, and then returnedto France the next day.This is partly the story of my life before and after the prize and my contributions,such as they were, but, more significantly, it describes my viewson the changes in the main trends in the field that occurred during the last30+ years. In addition, given my age of 72, I can’t resist giving advice.6.2 The foundation of mathematical statisticsDuring the period 1940 to 1979 an impressive theoretical edifice had beenbuilt on the foundations laid by Fisher, Pearson and Neyman up to the 1940sand then built up by Wald, Wolfowitz, LeCam, Stein, Chernoff, Hodges andLehmann, and Kiefer, among others, on the frequentist side and by L.J. Savageon the Bayesian side, with Herbert Robbins flitting in between. There were,of course, other important ideas coming out of the work of people such as59