David Hand

David John Hand (born 30 June 1950 in Peterborough) is a British statistician. His research interests include multivariate statistics, classification methods, pattern recognition, computational statistics and the foundations of statistics. He has written technical books on statistics, data mining, finance, classification methods, and measuring wellbeing, as well as science popularisation books including The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day; Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters; and Statistics: A Very Short Introduction. In 1991 he launched the journal Statistics and Computing. Education Hand was educated at the University of Oxford and the University of Southampton where he was awarded a PhD in 1977 for research supervised by . Career and research Hand served as professor of statistics at the Open University from 1988 until 1999, when he moved to Imperial College London, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Mathematics. Between 2010 and 2018 he took an extended sabbatical to serve as chief scientific advisor at Winton Capital Management. He served as president of the Royal Statistical Society from 2008 to 2009, then again in 2010 after Bernard Silverman stood down. Books Hand has published 31 books, inter alia: 2001. Principles of Data Mining 2007. Measurement Theory and Practice: the World Through Quantification 2014. (with Paul Allin). The Wellbeing of Nations: Meaning, Motive and Measurement. Wiley. 2014. The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles and Rare Events Happen All the Time 2020. From GDP to Sustainable Wellbeing: Changing Statistics or Changing Lives? 2020. Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters