It has been my good fortune to meet and get to know many remarkable people, mostly statisticians and mathematicians, and to derive much pleasure and benefit from these contacts. They were teachers, colleagues and students, and the following pages sketch their careers and our interactions. Also included are a few persons with whom I had little or no direct contact but whose ideas had a decisive influence on my work. To provide some coherence, the account is largely chronological and follows the steps of my own career. Taken together, these sketches provide a very personal picture of the dev- opment of statistical theory from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is the period between two revolutions: that of Fisher, Neyman, and Pearson, which laid the foundations for the classical statistical theory of that period; and the second revolution, forty years later, brought about by the advent of the computer, which turned statistics in new directions. The present account of this history is a highly selective one, which emphasizes the persons, institutions, and statistical topics that were close to my interests. One narrowing effect of this perspective stems from the fact that my career took place in the United States. As a consequence, the book focuses on American statisticians and institutions. Only the last two ch- ters discuss, briefly and very incompletely, developments in some other countries.

Erich L. Lehmann is Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the American and National Academies, a former Editor of theAnnals of Mathematical Statistics, and President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Chicago and Leiden, and was awarded the Wilks and Noether prizes. He is also the author ofTesting Statistical Hypotheses, Theory of Point Estimation, andElements of Large-Sample Theory, all published by Springer. Two more elementary books,Basic Concepts of Probability and Statistics (joint with Hodges) andNonparametrics have recently been reissued by SIAM and Springer, respectively.

Mathematical Preparation.- Becoming a Statistician.- Early Collaborators.- Mathematical Statistics at Other Universities.- The Annals.- The Berkeley Statistics Department I: Establishment and First Generation.- The Berkeley Statistics Department II: The Second Generation.- The Stanford Statistics Department.- Nonparametrics and Robustness.- Foundations I: The Frequentist Approach.- Foundations II: Bayesianism and Data Analysis.- Statistics Comes of Age.- New Tasks and Relationships.- England.- Contacts Abroad.