A CONVERSATION WITH WATSON,GEOFF

Geoffrey Stuart Watson, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, ce lebrated his 75th birthday on December 3, 1996. A native Australian, h is early education included Bendigo High School and Scotch College in Melbourne. After graduating with a B.A. (Hons.) from Melbourne Univers ity in December 1942, he spent the next few years, during and after Wo rld War II, doing research and teaching on applied mathematical topics . His wandering as a scholar began in 1947, when he became a graduate student in the Institute of Statistics in Raleigh, North Carolina. Lea ving Raleigh after two years, he wrote his thesis while visiting the D epartment of Applied Economics in Cambridge University. Raleigh awarde d him the Ph.D. degree in 1951. That same year, he returned to Austral ia, to a Senior Lectureship in Statistics at Melbourne University. He moved in 1954 to a Senior Fellowship at the Australian National Univer sity. Three years later, he left for England and North America. In 195 9, he become Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of T oronto. In 1962, he became Professor of Statistics at The Johns Hopkin s University in Baltimore. Soon thereafter he was appointed department chairman. In 1970, he moved to Princeton University as Professor and Chairman of Statistics. He became Professor Emeritus at Princeton in 1 992. He has published numerous research papers on a broad range of top ics in statistics and applied probability. [A curriculum vitae is give n in Mardia (1992).] His best known contributions are the Durbin-Watso n test for serial correlation [see Kotz and Johnson (1992), pages 229- 266], the Nadaraya-Watson estimator in nonparametric regression (Watso n, 1964) and fundamental methods for analyzing directional or axial da ta. He is the author of an important monograph, Statistics on Spheres. His professional honors include Membership in the International Stati stical Institute and Fellowships of the Institute of Mathematical Stat istics and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In private life, he is an accomplished painter of watercolors, a few of which may be seen on his website (http://www.princeton.edu/gsw/) at Princeton University. He married Shirley Elwyn Jennings in 1952. Thei r four children, one son and three daughters, pursue careers in Japane se literature, health care in Uganda, singing opera, and administering opera and ballet.