Happy Numbers

Why there are so very few statisticians as heroes (or even dashing villains) in novels is a pop culture mystery even bigger than the true identity of reggae magicians Johnny and the Attractions, or the actual final resting place of Butch and Sundance.

I have heard of, but don’t have, the 2008 novel Dancing with Dr Kildare, which features British medical statistician Nina, as well as the Finnish composer Sibelius, and the Tango, by Jane Yardley PhD, in real life a co-ordinator of medical trials for a small pharma.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2009.00341.x/abstract.

http://www.transworld-publishers.co.uk/catalog/book.htm?command=Search&db=twmain.txt&eqisbndata=0552773107

I’m now performing statistical consulting at two major hospitals so I’m about to re-read that wonderful book by major scriptwriter / drama writer Jim Keeble ‘The Happy Numbers of Julius Miles’, originally published in 2012 by independent outfit Alma

http://www.almabooks.com/the-happy-numbers-of-julius-miles-p-387-book.html

but there seems to be an April 2014 printing for the US.

It’s a great book about a big fellow, Julius Miles, a professional statistician with Barts Health NHS Trust, Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, East London, England. Julius loves stats – nose-counting ones such as the fact that it takes him 2 minutes to polish his shoes (with 30 seconds airing between polish, application and buff), as well as meaty methods such as multilevel Poisson regression for length of hospital stay.

Julius is about 1.93 metres (6 foot 4 inches) and wears size 13 (UK) shoes, a solid fellow (although   not reminiscent of the solid Ignatius Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s classic posthumous 1980  novel ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’).

There’s something about the name Julius, Julius Sumner Miller the US physicist and educator whose ‘Why is it so?’ ran on Australian TV for over 20 years from the 1960’s, and the frothy US drink Orange Julius, named after Julius Freed, around since 1926, taking off in ’29 (the official drink of the 1964 New York World’s Fair).

I can thoroughly recommend this colourful & warm book about Julius Miles, medical statistician.

Unknown's avatar

Author: Dr Dean McKenzie

I hold a BA(Honours) in Psychology from Deakin University, and much more recently, a PhD in Psychiatric Epidemiology (Classification & Regression Trees) from Monash University (2009) I have many years experience applying classical (e.g. ANOVA), contemporary (e.g. quantile regression) and data mining (e.g. trees, bagging, boosting, random forests) to psychological, medical and health data using Stata, IBM SPSS, Salford CART and open source Weka, as well as in statistical consulting, and advising people of many different levels of stats experience