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62 Statistics before and after COPSS PrizeM. Rosenblatt, my advisor and friend, E.L. Lehmann, and his favorite collaboratorwho brought me into statistics, J.L. Hodges, Jr. This trend continuedwith additional characters throughout my career. I should note that I havean unfair advantage over these friends since, with ‘B’ starting my name, I amalmost always listed first in the list of authors, though at that time much lessfuss was made about this in the mathematical sciences than now.I acquired PhD students rather quickly, partly for selfish reasons. I alwaysfound that I could think more clearly and quickly in conversation than insingle-handedly batting my head against a brick wall. More significantly, I liketo interact with different minds whose foci and manner of operation are quitedifferent from mine and whose knowledge in various directions is broader anddeeper.Thus my knowledge of invariance principles, concentration inequalities andthe like which led to the work on distribution-free multivariate tests came inpart out of working with Hira Koul on confidence regions for multivariatelocation based on rank tests.There are, of course, students who have had a profound effect on my researchdirections. Some of them became lifelong collaborators. I will name sixin advance. Their roles will become apparent later. There are others, such asJianqing Fan and Jeff Wu, who have played and are playing very importantroles in the field but whose interests have only occasionally meshed with mineafter their doctorates, though I still hope for more collaborations with them,too.(a) Ya’acov Ritov (PhD in Statistics from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, supervisedduring a 1979–80 sabbatical)(b) Elizaveta Levina (PhD in Statistics, UC Berkeley, 2002)(c) Katerina Kechris (PhD in Statistics, UC Berkeley, 2003)(d) Aiyou Chen (PhD in Statistics, UC Berkeley, 2004)(e) Bo Li (PhD in Statistics, UC Berkeley, 2006)(f) James (Ben) Brown (PhD in Applied Science and Technology, College ofEngineering, UC Berkeley, 2008).6.4 My work after 1979In most fields the amount, types and complexity of data have increased on anunprecedented scale. This, of course, originated from the increasing impactof computers and the development of refined sensing equipment. The rise incomputing capabilities also increased greatly the types of analysis we could