Size Matters
by
David J. Hand
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London

R.C.Bose described himself as a mathematical statistician, and he certainly made highly significant contributions to both mathematics and statistics. Each of these disciplines has its foundations in notions of ‘how much’. That is, on notions of quantification, or of measurement. In this talk I go back to these fundamental notions. I explore what measurement means, how measurement procedures are constructed, how measurements can be interpreted, and how they are manipulated to make valid inferences about the real world. The ideas of measurement are so ubiquitous that we often fail to notice them. But that failure carries its own dangers. The world described by measurements is not the real world. Occasionally, mismatches arise between the real world and the imaginary world of our measurements. Sometimes these mismatches can have serious, even fatal consequences.

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Date received: September 25, 2005