The Department of Statistics at The Florida State University was founded in September 1959 under the initiative and direction of Ralph Bradley. Since that time it has become one of the leading statistics departments in the United States. It has been the home at one time or another to many of the pioneers of modern statistics, including Frank Wilcoxon, Richard Savage, Frank Proschan, Jaroslav Hajek, Dev Basu, and Dennis Lindley.
Quality of Faculty
The faculty of the Department of Statistics has a distinguished record of research and teaching. They are or have been editors of two major journals. Four faculty have been elected Fellows of one or more professional societies, and five are Associate Editors of one or more journals. Faculty have obtained grants from the National Science Foundation, the Army Office of Research, and other agencies. In the history of the Department, five professors have been named Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, which is granted to only one of Florida State's more than 1,000 faculty each year. One professor has been named Distinguished Research Professor, seven faculty members have been given University Teaching awards, and one a University Advising award.
Computing Facilities
The University has one of the most technologically advanced campuses in the country. The department has its own computer system. Every graduate student office contains a workstation and PC; there is also a common computer room. All of the computers are connected to our local area network. Through the network you have access to the University's mainframe computer, other local networks, and to the world through Internet. With permission, extremely large jobs can be run on the computers of the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute, which has a Connection Machine CM-2 that has 64,000 parallel processors and a cluster of 75 superworkstations.
Statistical Consulting Center
The department provides statistical consulting to the other departments and to state government. We encourage our students to enroll in our consulting course, which provides unique in-depth training including videotaped practice consulting sessions. Students in this course have the opportunity to gain practical experience as a consultant to the Center's clients.
Interdisciplinary Research
This is a new area of emphasis of the Department, although regular meetings with graduate students and faculty in Biological Sciences to discuss research problems have been held since 1979, and several students have written dissertations based on problems arising in biology. In the summer of 1995 three teams of students analyzed data arising from research in oceanography. Two of our faculty have a joint grant with a faculty member in Meteorology to study "Empirically Determined Climate Predictability Using Nonlinear TimeSeries Models." One student is working on a dissertation topic in a joint project with industrial engineering.
Students
Our students are drawn from all over the United States and several foreign countries, from both public and private colleges. The placement of our graduates is detailed in the department brochure and on our alumni webpage.
Wilcoxon Reading Room
For the study and research of the students and faculty, the Department supports a small research statistics library which contains the leading journals. The Dirac Science Library, located next door, houses a major collection of professional books and journals whose catalog can be accessed by computer.