A CONVERSATION WITH DIXON,WILFRID,J.

Born on December 13, 1915, in Portland, Oregon, Wilfrid J. Dixon recog nized very early in his childhood that numbers fascinated him. One of three sons, he knew it would be his responsibility to finance any adva nced studies. So, with his parents' encouragement, he sold magazines a nd delivered papers from age 8 to finance his college education. Dixon received his B.A. in mathematics from Oregon State College in 1938, h is M.A. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1939, and h is Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Princeton in 1944 under Samue l S. Wilks. He was on the faculty at the University of Oklahoma (1942- 1943), the University of Oregon (1946-1955) and the University of Cali fornia at Los Angeles (1955-Emeritus since 1986). During 1940-1942 and 1944-1945 he was an operations analyst at Princeton University and on Guam for the Office of Scientific Research and Development. At UCLA, Dixon had a joint appointment in the Department of Preventive Medicine in the School of Medicine and in the Biostatistics Division in the Sc hool of Public Health. He was the first tenured statistician in each o f these schools. In addition, Dixon initiated the Biostatistics Divisi on, started its graduate program and served as its first Chief. He org anized the Department of Biomathematics in the School of Medicine and served as chair of this department from its inception in 1967 until 19 74. In 1973 he was appointed Professor of Psychiatry. As a member of t he U.S.-U.S.S.R. Joint Working Group on Computer Software (19741980), Dixon served as liaison to the Kolmogorov Laboratory at the University of Moscow. Many of his over 120 publications result from long-term co llaborations in pharmacology, physiology, surgery, neurology, cytology and psychiatry. His commitment to statistical consulting, coupled wit h his idea to parameterize computer programs in 1960, led to the devel opment of one of the first general statistical software packages, BMD, Biomedical Computer Programs, that has evolved into BMDP Statistical Software. Dixon organized the Statistical Computing Sections of both t he American Statistical Association and the International Statistical Institute. He made major contributions to nonparametric statistics, se rial correlation, adaptive (up-and-down) experimental designs, robust statistics and the analysis of incomplete data. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statis tics, the Royal Statistical Society and the American Association for t he Advancement of Science and received the ASA's 1992 Wilks Medal. Whi le at the University of Oregon (1951), Dixon coauthored with Frank Mas sey a first-of-its-kind statistical textbook for nonmathemeticians tha t sold over 300,000 copies.