A Conversation with Jack Kalbfleisch and Jerry Lawless

Half a century ago, two 18-year-olds arrive at university, are randomly paired as chemistry lab partners and become fast friends. Their careers and even family lives entwine, and both go on to join the pantheon of Canada's great statisticians. This all begins at a time when North American university education, and access to it, is growing explosively. It begins at a small start-up university, an upstart start-up that eschews conventional wisdom, finds a way to mine a seam of the brightest high school students and innovatescatching important waves and becoming a mathematical sciences powerhouse. In this interview, we explore these stories and some lessons that might be learned from them. Unfortunately lurking variables confound the easily implemented put them in chemistry class in random pairs' as a prescription for producing top-flight statisticians.