Honoring great teaching
It was sunny and summery on Saturday (Nov. 13), which broke the drear spell of autumn. So what were the odds of enticing 100 people to stay inside — and listen to lectures on statistics? The odds were excellent. That many people attended the inaugural David K. Pickard Memorial Lecture at Maxwell Dworkin. The program was named for a junior faculty member in statistics who died young, but not before winning every major Harvard undergraduate-teaching award for his passion, accessibility, patience, and clarity. “I literally gasped when I saw David’s record,” said Statistics Department Chair Xiao-Li Meng. He called the afternoon symposium a way of expressing “belated but deep gratitude” to Pickard for inspiring a generation of young scholars to become passionate teachers themselves. “Henceforth, the name ‘Pickard’ is going to be synonymous with great teaching,” said Carl N. Morris, a 20-year veteran of Harvard’s statistics faculty. The Canada-born Pickard — dashing, athletic, and...