The Mardia Lecture: "Seeing patterns that aren’t there – and other statistical problems in investigating medical misconduct" Professor Peter Green FRS
- Date: Thursday 7 November 2024, 16:45 – 19:00
- Location: Esther Simpson Building, Lyddon Terrace, Woodhouse, Leeds LS2
- Cost: Free
Join us on 7 November for the first-ever Mardia Lecture "Seeing patterns that aren’t there – and other statistical problems in investigating medical misconduct" with Professor Peter Green FRS.
Hosted by the School of Mathematics, the Mardia Lecture is a new series that will be held triennially in honour of Professor Kanti Mardia OBE. This talk will be aimed at a general audience, and all are very welcome to attend; we hope that you will join us in celebrating Kanti’s huge contribution to both statistics and the University of Leeds.
About our speaker
Professor Peter Green FRS is Emeritus Professor and Professorial Research Fellow in the Statistics Department at the University of Bristol. He is distinguished for his contributions to computational statistics, in particular his development of reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo, and more recently his work on statistics and the law.
He chaired the Royal Statistical Society report on investigating medical misconduct and the use of statistics and has recently been in the news discussing the use of statistics in the trial of Lucy Letby.
Peter was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003. He served as President of the Royal Statistical Society from 2001 to 2003 and won its Guy Medal in both Bronze and Silver.
About this lecture
When you see a horse in the clouds or a human face on the surface of Mars, is it really there? If 37 comes up three days in a row, is the lottery biased? If prehistoric monuments align, was that planned? Humans naturally see patterns, and when they do, often want to decide they have meanings – but the pattern may be an illusion. What if a nurse is on duty every time a neonatal infant dies – could that mean she is guilty of murder?
In his lecture, “Seeing patterns that aren’t there – and other statistical problems in investigating medical misconduct”, Professor Green will focus on the importance of mathematical aptitude in legal proceedings.
In several cases in recent years, medical staff have been suspected of harming their patients on the basis of apparent correlations between their duty shifts and suspicious events on the ward, and criminal convictions have occurred. In some of these cases, the member of staff was subsequently completely exonerated – their original trials were miscarriages of justice. Is it time for courts to require statistical expertise when data of this kind is presented?
About Kanti V. Mardia OBE
Kanti made fundamental contributions to the statistical community, in particular shape analysis, analysis of directional and multivariate data, geostatistics, and bioinformatics. He was awarded the Guy Medal in Silver from the Royal Statistical Society in 2003, and the Wilks Memorial Award by the American Statistical Association in 2013 to recognise his outstanding contributions to statistics. He was awarded an OBE in 2023 for services to statistical science.
Book your place
The lecture will take place in the Esther Simpson Building at the University of Leeds, with arrival and registration from 4.45pm in the café, and the lecture commencing at 5.15pm in Lecture Theatre 1.01. This will be followed by a drinks reception in the Esther Simpson café from 6.15pm – 7pm.