always the last to know

Checking out Cosma Shalizi's Three-Toed Sloth, discovered that David Freedman had died. (Freedman is the Freedman of Freedman, Pisani and Purves, Statistics, a splendid introduction to the subject, as well as, I gather, a quantity of articles that would put Mr Updike to shame.) The obituary on the Berkeley website says: Freedman worked on martingale inequalities, Markov processes, de Finetti’s theorem, consistency of Bayes estimates, sampling, the bootstrap, procedures for testing and evaluating models, census adjustment, epidemiology, statistics and the law. How green was your valley.