Alumni Story: Paul Velleman ’71

I earned a PhD in Statistics from Princeton. I then joined the Department of Social Statistics at Cornell in 1975, where I’ve taught since then. (For a coincidental link, the Department’s home is the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, which turned out to be the undergraduate school of Nick Mullins, who was my social science side advisor at Dartmouth—but I didn’t know that until I came here.)
 
My career has included developing the statistics software, Data Desk, which is still successfully sold worldwide, writing the first e-book in Statistics (ActivStats) and co-authoring 6 textbooks in introductory and intermediate level statistics, published by Pearson.
 
I continue to teach at Cornell, often teaching the introductory statistics course aimed at social science undergraduates. I’d say that I’ve stayed pretty connected to my MSS degree. Just last week, it came up when advising a student who was investigating a possible major in Statistics and asked how I’d gotten into the field. (10/2014)