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New Zealand Statistical Association Newsletter 66

Obituary - Frank Avery Haight 1919-2006

Frank Avery Haight, who was the author of NZ's first statistical PhD thesis, died last year. The obituary below first appeared in the NZMS newsletter.

Frank Avery Haight was born in 1919 in Des Moines Iowa, and he studied from 1936 to 1940 at The State University of Iowa, where he graduated as BA and MSc in Mathematics [Golob & Haight]. The State University of Iowa was then a leader in agricultural statistics, and Frank attended lectures on statistics given there by Allen T. Craig [Roberts, p.251]. Later, Frank was knowledgeable about mediæval Russian history — could he have studied that at the State University of Iowa?

In 1941, Frank published his first mathematics paper ‘On the independence of operators on a lattice’, in the Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science. World War 2 then intervened, and when it ended in 1945 Frank was an historical researcher, in the USA army of occupation in Japan. In about 1948, he chose to take his discharge from the army in New Zealand, where he worked as a truck driver. One day in 1949, while driving a truck through Parnell in Auckland, he decided that it was time to get back to mathematics. He parked the truck alongside a telephone box, and he telephoned the Professor of Mathematics at Auckland University College (then a branch of the University of New Zealand), and asked whether there might be any chance of becoming a lecturer in mathematics there.

Professor Henry George Forder (1889–1981) was a distinguished mathematician, renowned particularly as a geometer [Butcher]. He was very English in manner, quiet and reserved but witty. Nevertheless, Forder realized that this brash lanky Yank had much ability in mathematics and statistics, and Frank was appointed as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics. Also, his wife Ernestine became a Tutor in the Department of Physics. Marin Segedin was appointed in 1949 as Lecturer in Mathematics [Nield]. He recalls that, soon after Frank was appointed, he told Marin that he had telephoned Professor Forder and reported that he had bought a house in Auckland. “Very good. Are you on the phone?”. “??”. “I say — are you on the phone?”. “Well — I’m standing by it”. “?!”.

In 1950 I took Frank’s Pure Mathematics 2 course. His lectures were not carefully organized but his exuberant manner, and his skill in providing clear responses to questions, made him an effective lecturer. One morning he came to the lecture theatre, looking somewhat bemused. After a few minutes, he explained to the class the problem which had been distracting him. A few days previously, he had received a telephone call from an Army officer, telling Frank that the Chief of Staff would like him to deliver a lecture to the highest officers in the NZ Army, about “American Military Strategy in the Pacific”. “But I don’t know what American military strategy in the Pacific is”, he responded. “Fine!” said the officer. Frank thought that was the end of the matter — but a few minutes before our lecture started he had received a telephone call from an aide–de-camp of the Chief of Staff, telling him the date, time and place at which he was to address the Chief of Staff and his top officers! Frank explained to us that he still did not know what American military strategy in the Pacific was; but since he was an American then he would expound his own strategy. He would talk briefly about outposts in Guam, and the strategic significance of Antarctica. But since he was addressing the top officers of the NZ Army, he would concentrate on those aspects of his strategy which related most directly to NZ.

Accordingly, he would explain to the officers that the most strategic spot for the defence of NZ is Gibraltar! Indeed, Gibraltar is antipodal to Whangarei; and hence if The Enemy occupied Gibraltar, then they could invade NZ from all directions at once!

I hope that Frank’s script for that talk has been preserved amongst his papers.

The first long–playing records began to be sold in 1948. In 1953 Frank made a visit to his family in Iowa, where he bought an LP which had just been issued privately by a graduate student of mathematics at Harvard – Tom Lehrer. Frank smuggled that LP past NZ Customs and played it to some students here, who were delighted. Domestic tape recorders were starting to be available, and within a year pirated tapes (3rd or 4th generation), copied from that contraband LP, were being listened to by students at all branches of the University of New Zealand. Consequently, when Tom Lehrer made his first recital tour outside the USA (in about 1958), he started that tour in NZ, where he already had many fans (thanks to Frank Haight).

Since about 1930, many people had urged that the Maori language be taught at Auckland University College. In 1950 the conservative majority of academics reluctantly agreed to a Stage 1 course in Maori, but in 1952 they rejected a proposal for a Maori 2 course. Early in 1953, the historian Keith Sinclair attended a crucial Faculty meeting on that issue. He reported that “an American mathematician on the staff, Frank A. Haight, passed the word around that, according to his arithmetic, the liberals had a majority. They were contacted and attended Faculty; not one of them spoke, they listened to the conservatives, who were looking very pleased with the situation until the vote was taken and Maori 2 was overwhelmingly approved” [Sinclair, p.202].

Frank had intense interest in chess, and he played in the NZ Chess Championships in the 1950s [Roberts, p.251].

In 1951, Frank started a new course on Mathematical Statistics 1, which he taught at the level of Stage 3 or 4 papers [Nield]. He had kept his notes from Allen T. Craig’s course at Iowa, and also Erich Lehmann’s mimeographed notes on estimation and significance testing, and those provided the basis for his first lectures. Also in 1951, Frank began working on a Ph.D. thesis An investigation of queue stability with reference to the traffic intensity. At that time, there was nobody in NZ who could supervise a Ph.D. thesis in statistics. Pat Moran (at Australian National University) was the external examiner, and Hamish Thompson (in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Applied Mathematics Division, Auckland branch) was the internal examiner. Frank used to spend much of his summers in Wellington, so that he could consult Biometrika and other journals not kept in Auckland, at the library of DSIR Applied Mathematics Laboratory.

In 1957, Frank published his second paper on ‘Queueing with balking’, in Biometrika. Also in 1957, he received the only Ph.D. in Mathematics which was awarded by the University of New Zealand. Indeed, Frank’s thesis was the first Ph.D. thesis with any statistical content which had been produced in NZ [Roberts, p.251].

At the end of 1957 Frank moved to UCLA [Nield], but he continued to visit
NZ for another 30 years. In 1971, John Butcher edited a Festschrift for Henry George Forder, with tributes from many eminent mathematicians [Butcher]. Frank (then at the University of Pennsylvania) contributed a chapter ‘On a generalization of Pythagoras’s theorem’, ending with “I wish to express my gratitude to H. G. Forder; during our professional association between 1949 and 1957 he showed me that geometry is not yet exhausted” (pp.73–77). Frank quickly became acknowledged as the leader in traffic statistics, and his pioneering book Mathematical Theories of Traffic Flow (1963) had great influence. At the 1966 International Congress of Mathematicians held at Moscow, I again met Frank. A Russian translation of that book had just been published, and Frank was happily spending the royalties on books and records. I asked him where had he gathered the data for the examples in that book. He told me that no such data existed when he wrote the book, and so he invented all data for those examples. But in direct response to his book, much data had since then been gathered on traffic statistics.

Frank joined the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California — Irvine. He created 3 major journals, which he edited vigorously for many years. In 1967 he founded Transportation Research, which fissioned into Part A: Policy and Practice and Part B: Methodological. He became intensely interested in traffic safety, and in 1969 he founded the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention. During the 1980s he commuted frequently between Irvine and Melbourne, on a major research collaboration on traffic injuries between UCI and Monash University.

Frank retired as Professor at UCI in 1998, and I have a copy of his lengthy list of publications up to 1998. He received the 2002 Distinguished Career Award from the American Public Health Association.

“After a stewardship of over 35 years, Frank recently handed over the reins of his three journals to a new generation of four editors, located in three countries. They have a tough act to follow. Frank always felt that, as an editor, he worked for the authors, not for the publisher nor for academic institutions that used peer review publications as evaluation criteria. He also went about his business as he did everything in his life, with great gusto and humor.” [Golob & Haight].

Frank Avery Haight died on 2006 April 30, at the age of 86. Two days later, his colleague Tom Golob announced that

The world is a less interesting place today.

References
John Charles Butcher (editor ), A Spectrum of Mathematics: Essays Presented to H. G. Forder, Auckland University Press & Oxford University Press, 1971.

Tom F. Golob, The “Frank Avery Haight Tribute Site” contains many tributes to him, with several photographs. <http://www.julianhaight.com/fah/obit.shtml>

Tom F. Golob & Molly I. Haight, ‘In Memoriam Frank A. Haight 1919-2006’,Transportation Research Part C 14 (2006), 229–231.

Frank Avery Haight, ‘On the independence of operators on a lattice’. Proceedings, Iowa Academy of Science Vol. 49, (1941) pp. 301–304.

Frank Avery Haight, ‘Queueing with balking’, Biometrika 44 (1957), 360–369.

Frank Avery Haight, An Investigation of Queue Stability with Special Reference to the Traffic Intensity, Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Zealand, 1957.

Frank Avery Haight, Mathematical Theories of Traffic Flow, Academic Press, New York, 1963, 242 pp. [Russian language version Matematiqeska_Teori_ Transportnyh Potokov, MIR, Moskva, 1966.]

Frank Avery Haight, ‘On a generalization of Pythagoras’s theorem’, in [Butcher 1971], 73–77.

Donald A. Nield, ‘University Mathematics in Auckland: a historical essay’, Mathematical Chronicle 12 (1983), 1–38.

H.S. Roberts (editor), A History of Statistics in New Zealand, New Zealand Statistical Association (Inc.), Wellington, 1999.

Keith A. Sinclair, A History of the University of Auckland 1883–1983, Auckland University Press, 1983.

Garry J. Tee, 2007–5–17