Gore Lecture: Richard De Veaux "The Seven Deadly Sins of Data Science"

Richard De Veaux, Ph.D. (Dick) is C. Carlise and Margaret Tippit Professor of Statistics and currently serves as Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Williams College. He holds degrees in Civil Engineering (B.S.E. Princeton), Mathematics (A.B. Princeton), Dance Education (M.A.) and Statistics (Ph.D.) at Stanford where he studied statistics with Persi Diaconis and dance with Inga Weiss.

Dick has taught at the Wharton School and the Engineering School at Princeton and has been a visiting researcher at INRA in Montpellier and a visiting professor at Paris V. De Veaux has won numerous teaching awards from the Engineering Council at Princeton. He has won both the Wilcoxon and Shewell (twice) awards from the American Society for Quality, is a fellow of the American Statistical Assoc (ASA) and an elected member of the ISI. In 2006-2007 he was the William R. Kenan Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. In 2008 he was named the Statistician of the Year by the Boston Chapter of the ASA. He has served on the Board of Directors of the ASA and is past chair of the Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science. He was the ASA Vice President for the term 2019-2021.

Dick has been a consultant for over 35 years for such Fortune 500 companies as Hewlett-Packard, Alcoa, American Express, Bank One, GlaxoSmithKline, Dupont, Pillsbury, SanofiPasteur and General Electric. He holds two U.S. patents and is the author of more than 40 refereed journal articles. He once helped Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead with the question “How many drummers are there in the world” and for that he is known as the “Official Statistician of the Grateful Dead”. He is the co-author, with Paul Velleman and David Bock, of the critically acclaimed textbooks “Intro Stats”, “Stats: Modeling the World” and “Stats: Data and Models” and with Norean Sharpe and Paul Velleman of “Business Statistics”, and “Business Statistics: A First Course”, all published by Pearson.

His hobbies include cycling, swimming, singing -- and dancing (he was once a professional dancer and taught Modern Dance during Winter Study at Williams). He has been a member of the regional choir of Paris (Choeur Vittoria -- http://choeurvittoria.fr/english/) since 2005. He also teaches a Winter Study course called “The History, Geography and Economics of the Wines of France”. He is the father of four: two boys and two girls.

Host or Publisher University of Delaware Lerner College of Business & Economics