I was born in Big Timber, MT in July 1939. My father was a teacher, a coach, a principal, and a superintendent. At an early age we moved to Power, MT. The town of Power started in 1910 under one of the homestead acts. As people came by rail and settled in all directions around Power, a number of small country schools appeared. Later a 1-12 school was started in Power. People in Power are very proud of their schools. A few years ago, a history of these schools was written. I attended school in Power for 12 years. I really liked mathematics while I was in school. My last two years of mathematics were via correspondence from the University of Montana. My graduation class had 17 students.

At Montana State College from 1959 to 1965

I spent my first two years of college at Eastern Montana College (EMC) in Billings and transferred to Montana State College (MSC) for my last two undergraduate years. I completed a BS Degree in Mathematics Spring 1961. Starting with an elementary course in Statistics at EMC my interest in Statistics began. I took several more Statistics courses at MSC along with several Mathematics courses in my BS Degree program. I enjoyed Mathematics and Statistics courses and did well in all of them. I begin to think seriously about going on to graduate school.

During my Junior year I met Nenette Blake from Hardin. She was on her way to becoming a high school mathematics teacher. She was one year behind me in school. Professor John Hurst was Chairman of the Mathematics Department at the time. I don’t believe he knew that Nenette and I were a pair. He offered advice to Nenette about finding a husband before she got out of school and told me to forget girls and concentrate on my studies until I finished school. I started my graduate studies in September 1961 and Nenette started her Senior year. We got married at Thanksgiving in 1961. Both of us earned our degrees on schedule. Our marriage survived as well and we are closing in on 60 married years in November 2021. Our 3 daughters are all MSU graduates.

During the 1960-61 school year we both ended up working part-time in the Ryon Lab which had an IBM 650. We each got a job there separately and neither of us remembers exactly how we got there. We think Professor McFeely may have been responsible for it. I think we both had taken a computing class from him. He may have been in charge of the Ryon lab. I was doing some statistical consulting and helping people run their programs. Nenette remembers doing the latter. She thinks I was her boss. We both remember the huge stacks of punched cards needed to do anything on the computer. I also worked one summer in the Lab.

When I was a Senior at MSC, the Mathematics Department started a PhD program in Mathematics with one option being an emphasis in Statistics. Or maybe, there was a PhD program in Mathematics and a Statistics option was added. Someone in the Department had applied for a federal grant and received several 3-year Graduate Fellowships. They were called National Defense Education Act fellowships. They paid for education and living expenses so that a student could finish a PhD in 3 years. I was offered an NDEA fellowship and quickly accepted it.

When I started working on my PhD in Fall 1961, there were 3 faculty members in Statistics: Frank McFeely, Charles Mode, and Charles Quesenberry. My goal was to complete my PhD in 3 years. I eventually chose Charles Quesenberry as my dissertation advisor.

Nenette was in her Senior year. During the summer of 1962 I had a job at Autonetics, a Division of North American Aviation in Anaheim, California, so Nenette and I spent that summer in Anaheim. They were developing the Minuteman Missiles. Another Division was developing rocket engines for Missiles.  The summer of 1963 I had a job at Battelle in Columbus, Ohio, so we spent the summer there.

After Nenette graduated in May 1962, she took a job teaching at Manhattan High School and taught all of the mathematics courses there for the next 2 years. We rented an apartment owned by the school for the two years while Nenette taught there. Although these were her first two years teaching, they were highly successful and they hated to see her leave. These were her first two of many years teaching.

I don’t think I had a formal program for my PhD at MSC. When I finished my B.S. in Mathematics at MSC I had taken several upper level courses in Mathematics and Statistics. I think I took all of the Graduate courses in Statistics that were offered during my three years in graduate school. I also took several graduate level courses in Mathematics that were appropriate for a Statistician. At the end of this document is a list of all Mathematics and Statistics courses that I took at MSC during years 1959-64. While working on my PhD I earned an MS Degree in December 1962.

I worked very hard trying to complete my PhD in 3 years. I was essentially done with my dissertation in the Spring Quarter of 1964. It was too late that Spring to defend it, get it ready to print, etc. The department gave me an Instructor’s position for the 1964-65 academic year to teach the undergraduate level Mathematical Statistics sequence and a couple of Calculus courses. This was great way to end my education at MSC and it cemented my thinking that I wanted to be a college professor. Since I had not been a TA it gave me some teaching experience. I was able to defend my dissertation and finalize everything needed to officially complete my PhD in December 1964. I then had time to begin searching for my first academic position for Fall 1965 while still teaching. During the summer of 1964, Professor Quesenberry and I drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, to attend National Statistics meetings. He instilled in me the importance of attending national meetings that I never forgot.

I took a position as Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at Western Michigan University (WMU) in Kalamazoo, Michigan for Fall 1965. I was the first Statistician in the Department. I liked the people, I liked the job, and we liked Kalamazoo and Michigan. WMU was in the process of starting a PhD program in Math. They had hired a full Professor from Michigan to be the Chairman of the Department and guide this process. The only thing that could draw me away from there was a job in Montana. Since I had a recent degree from MSC, the University of Montana was my only possibility.

University of Montana (1967-2001)

During my second year at WMU, an opening for a Statistician in the Mathematics Department at the University of Montana (UM) was advertised. I applied for the job, got it, and joined the Mathematics Department at the UM in Fall 1967. I remained there until I retired in 1998. After that, I taught one semester a year for three years before fully retiring.

A statistician with a PhD in an academic position is involved in lots of different things under the broad areas of Teaching, Research, and Service. In the next few paragraphs, I will summarize what I did during my career at the University of Montana. My career was quite a bit different than what I think a more typical one might be for a PhD statistician in a university setting.

I was the second Statistician in the Mathematics Department when I arrived and the other one had only been there 2-3 years. He came from the University of Michigan. The department had B.S. and MS degrees in Mathematics with Statistics options. I do not know the history of Statistics at UM before I arrived there. The Department did not have a PhD program but it was being discussed. There were two computers on campus, an IBM 650 for faculty and students, and an IBM 360 for the administration.

Doing something about the computing needs in Statistics and other academic areas was the first problem I tackled. I was appointed to a campus-wide committee to look at all the computing needs across campus, both academic and administrative. About this time, computers had begun coming out that could support networking for several users at once. I felt this was what we needed in the academic side of things. After going to a couple of universities where this was already being done, UM ended up with a DEC10 for academic use.

After a couple of years, I realized that there were a lot of graduate departments that needed a good year-long course in Statistical Methods with a Statistical Computing component. We ended up revamping a course we had and adding a one credit Statistical Computing Component to it. It became the standard Statistics course for graduate students in many departments on campus. A few departments also required these courses in their B.S. degrees as well. Eventually we had an instructor that handled the computing component for this course. When teaching such a course you end up with a number of graduate students asking you to serve on their committees. Faculty members, in other department, also find you when they have statistical questions related to their work. This can generate a substantial amount of statistical consulting. This was another area of my job that I really enjoyed. Sometimes, if the help you give a faculty member is substantial, you can end up as a co-author on a paper. I rarely did this as writing the final paper and getting it published was time-consuming. Statistical consulting alone for students and faculty on campus already used up a good deal of my time.

 We also had a one semester sophomore level Statistics course that was required in many B.S. degree programs at UM. Several hundred undergraduate students a year took this course. The majority of these were Business Administration students. About that time, we hired another statistician who came from the University of Wisconsin. We had plenty of work for all three of us. We used our TAs in Statistics to assist with the teaching of the sophomore level Statistics course. While at UM, I taught nearly all of the Department’s Statistics courses for our own majors. I enjoyed teaching and I think I was successful at it.

Around eight years after I came to the UM, the higher administration supported the Department’s desire to create a PhD degree in Mathematics and a Statistics option. In setting up the PhD program we spent a lot of time thinking about where our graduates were going to go when they completed their PhD. We decided it was likely that most of them would be going to four-year schools and be mainly teachers. We were not going to be training PhD research mathematicians. The Department applied for and won a substantial grant to start the program. Some of the money was used to hire some senior-level faculty members from schools that had good PhD programs. The grant we received was basically one to implement a PhD program that was training PhDs for four-year colleges.

Shortly after we started the PhD program, we hired another statistician, this one from Iowa. After I had been at UM for around 20 years and during my second time as Department Chairman, we hired another statistician this one from the North Carolina State University. The statistician who was here when I arrived was Department Chair for several years. He then moved on to be Associate Dean and then Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences before retiring.

Service to UM, Missoula, the state and federal government, and the profession

I served two terms as Department Chairman, for a total of about 5 years. This was not an easy job. We had B.A., MS, and PhD programs. We had around 50 people teaching courses each semester, we had lots of graduate students with several coming and going each year, faculty members have to be evaluated each year, we had several grants to manage, and on and on. I also found money to get two computer labs for students set up in the Math Building during my first term. I guess I did alright as the department and the Dean kept asking me to be the Chairman. Although it was not my favorite job, I did win an award as “UM Academic Administrator of the Year,” worth $1000.

I will now discuss some other statistical things I was involved with, over the years that I was a faculty member at UM. This in not intended to be an exhaustive list.

Here is an example of a statistical consulting problem that had a good result. We hired a senior level mathematician and after he had been in Missoula for a few years he had the idea that a bus system could be developed In Missoula. He gathered 3 or 4 people together, me included. After we spent some time thinking and talking about this it was decided we should gather data in the community to see how they felt about a bus system, what area it should cover, whether people were willing to support it financially, etc. The results were all very positive. We turned the results over to the county commissioners. They proposed a special bus district that would be taxed to fund the bus system. The public voted in favor of starting a bus system, verifying that our survey was accurate. A bus system for the entire Missoula Valley was started. It was very successful from day one, and continues to be so yet today, many years later. I rode it to and from my home and UM, 5 miles each way, for many years.

I spent 3 or 4 summers working at the U.S. Forest Service Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula.  It is one of two such Labs, the other being in Macon, Georgia. The Missoula Lab has 3 sections, Fire Effects, Fire Suppression, and Fire Behavior. I got started at the Lab because one of our master’s students worked as a statistician in the Fire Behavior section. The Forest Service experts have lots of data, including weather data, moisture data, plant data, soil data, etc. They use it to make decisions about how to attack a fire, long and short term. They also develop tools to be used by firefighters on the fire line to make real-time decisions, some that could be life or death decisions. It was interesting statistical work.

I started attending national meetings of mathematicians and statisticians as soon as I started teaching. I thought this was very important and thoroughly enjoyed them. I helped a faculty member on a small project that he was working on with the Associate Director of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). They had some data that required a statistician’s expertise. A little later I received an appointment to the Survey Committee of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS). True or not, I attributed the appointment to the help I gave the MAA. It led to 25 years of service on two Survey Committees of two national mathematics organizations. I thoroughly enjoyed that collaborative service but it did mean that I attended national Mathematics meetings rather than Statistics meetings. I will now describe some of the projects we completed.

The CBMS is an umbrella organization of 19 professional societies. Its purpose is to promote understanding and cooperation among those organizations. A few of the member societies are: American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC), American Mathematical Society (AMS), American Statistical Association (ASA), Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), MAA, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). CBMS carries out a large survey every 5 years, gathering all kinds of information about undergraduate programs in the mathematical sciences in the U.S. The four-year schools are broken down by highest degree offered (PhD, MS, B). Two year colleges are also in the Survey. The 1995 Survey Report was titled Statistical Abstract of Undergraduate Programs in the Mathematical Sciences in the U.S., Fall 1995 CBMS Survey. (175 pages). There is a CBMS Survey Committee that is responsible for getting these surveys carried out and publishing the reports every 5 years. These surveys have been funded by NSF.

I was a member of the CBMS Survey Committee from 1978-1996 and I was co-author of the 1985, 1990 and 1995 survey reports. I designed and carried out the analysis for the 1985 and 1990 Surveys. I was responsible for all statistical aspects of these three studies. The committee met twice annually, at the annual math meetings in January and in the spring at AMS headquarters in Providence, RI.

The AMS, MAA, ASA, and IMS jointly sponsor a committee called the DATA committee. The Data committee is responsible for the gathering of information annually from all American universities that have graduate programs in the Mathematical Sciences. Those with PhD programs are divided into 3 categories according to quality of their PhD program. (The DATA committee does not do the classifying of the PhD programs.) Of course, these schools are also in the undergraduate CBMS Survey. The gathering of this data is handled by AMS staff at their headquarters in Providence, RI. Normally 3 articles with results are written and published annually in The Notices of the AMS. The articles are written by the chair of the DATA committee jointly with staff at AMS. This committee meets annually at AMS headquarters and occasionally at the Math meetings in January.

I was on the DATA committee from 1987-2003. I gave statistical advice as needed at the meetings. As a statistician I also worked closely with the staff at AMS as they gathered and summarized the data annually. I served as the Chair of the DATA committee in 2001-2003 and was principal author of 8 reports published in the Notices of the AMS while I was Chairman.

As a member of at least one of these two data gathering committees for 25 years I met and worked with a number of very well-known mathematicians, including two presidents of MAA and the Associate Director of MAA. In addition to visiting the headquarters of AMS, I also visited the headquarters of the MAA in Washington D.C. The staff at the headquarters of AMS was first rate. I did not work with the staff of MAA. Both committees really need a statistician member. I was willing to dig in and do some serious work. I guess that is why I repeatedly was reappointed to these committees. I really enjoyed my committee service.

I previously mentioned that a PhD statistician at a University is involved in Teaching, Research and Service. In my case, I also got involved in a lot of Administrative work for my Department as well. My career at UM was heavy on Teaching, Service (university and professional), Administration (university), and light in Research on statistical theory and methods. The Department and the University apparently felt that what I was doing was acceptable, as I was treated well by both.

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Mathematics and Statistics Courses taken while a student at Montana State College in the 1960s

by Don Loftsgaarden, January 5, 2021

I earned three degrees from the Mathematics Department, a B.S. (June 1961) and an MS (Dec. 1962), both at Montana State College, and a PhD (Dec 1964) at Montana State University.* I don’t recall having specific programs. I took formal courses for five years. I will list all courses I took in the Mathematics Department at Montana State College in years 59-60, 60-61, 61-62, 62-63, 63-64. I attended Eastern Montana College in Billings in 1957-59.

1959-60

Math 301, 302             Differential Equations
Math 303                     Operational Methods
Math 331                     Machine Methods in Calculus
Math 407, 408, 409     Mathematical Statistics
Math 432, 433             Electronic Processing of Scientific Data

1960-61

Math 306                     Boolean Algebra
Math 316, 317, 318     Introduction to Theoretical Algebra
Math 411, 412, 413     Advanced Calculus
Math 424, 425             Statistical Methods
Math 541, 542, 543     Probability

1961-62

Math 430                     Experimental Design
Math 441, 442, 443     Numerical Analysis
Math 450                     Complex Variables
Math 513, 514, 515     Real Variables
Math 580                     Measure Theory 3 credits
Math 580                     Theory of Statistical Inference 9 credits

1962-63

Math 416, 417             Theory of Matrices
Math 435                     Survey Design
Math 505                     Theory of Least Squares
Math 506, 507             Theory of Analysis of Variance
Math 509, 510, 511     Complex Variables
Math 580                     Nonparametrics  5 credits

1963-64

Math 537, 538, 539     Multivariate Statistical Analysis

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* on July 1, 1965, Montana State College (MSC) officially was renamed Montana State University (MSU)