Tony Greenfield
Encyclopedia
Professor Tony Greenfield, (born 26 April 1931) is a British
statistical consultant
and academic. He was formerly Head of Process Computing and Statistics at the British Iron and Steel Research Association, Sheffield, and Professor of Medical Computing and Statistics at Queen's University, Belfast.
He is now a visiting professor to the Industrial Statistics Research Unit of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and to the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He also assists many other universities around the world. He presents workshops, and teaches and examines post-graduate students.
Professor Greenfield recently co-authored Design and Analyse your Experiments with Minitab with Andrew Metcalfe, and is currently working on Engineering Statistics with Matlab. His inaugural lecture (1980) at Queen’s University is still sold as a booklet. His first book, Research Methods for Postgraduates is highly regarded on both sides of the Atlantic. He has also had a strong hand in The Pocket Statistician, Statistical Practice in Business and Industry and an Encyclopaedia of Statistics in Quality and Reliability. One of his contributions to his local community of Great Hucklow is the editing of a history of lead mining in the area: Lead in the Veins.
Tony is a founding member and Past President of European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics, and for many years he was a prominent member of the Royal Statistical Society
. He was the first editor of RSS News and of the ENBIS newsletter and magazine. In just ten years, ENBIS has grown to a membership base of around 1500 practitioners spread across more than sixty countries. Tony has made a huge contribution to the society’s magnificent achievements.
Tony is a Chartered Statistician
(CStat) and a Chartered Scientist
(CSci).
on 26th April 1931 to Geoffrey James Greenfield (1900–1978) and Hilda Aynsley (1903–1976).
Tony Greenfield worked in an iron mine when he left Bedford School
at the age of 17. He later worked in coal mines, a brass tube factory, and in a copper mine and studied mining engineering at Imperial College London
. He received the diploma in journalism from the Regent Street Polytechnic
, worked on the Sunday Express and Sunday Mirror
before turning to technical journalism for ten years. He was an active member of the Sheffield Junior Chamber of Commerce of which he was chairman of the Business Affairs committee and editor of The Hub, the chamber’s monthly magazine. At the 1963 conference in Tel Aviv of Junior Chamber International
he was acknowledged as the editor of the best junior chamber magazine in the world.
He moved into the steel industry to write technical reports for Operations Research
(OR) scientists. There he found satisfaction in solving production problems, studied OR, mathematics, statistics and computing leading to an external degree from University College London
. He moved into steel research and became head of process computing and statistics. Much of his work was in design and analysis of experiments for which he received his PhD. When the laboratories closed he joined the medical faculty of University of Sheffield
where he was statistician to a multi-centre study of cot death. He taught medical statistics to undergraduates, supported post graduates and medical staff with consultancy and co-authored one of the first interactive statistics packages to be written on Prime computers.
Early retirement enabled him to work as a research consultant.
Greenfield's passion is to persuade all scientists and engineers to write, speak and present their work in language that other people understand well enough to use in some ways. And, like W B Yeats, he asks scientists to "think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people." Like Isaac Asimov
, he is "on fire to explain," and doesn’t "indulge in scholarly depth."
He believes strongly that the economic fortune of Europe depends on the success in the world markets of our manufacturing industries.
"Statisticians and statistical practitioners across Europe know that statistical methods have improved business and industrial performance and can continue do so in the future," he says. "Our national quality of life will be improved and secured if we can communicate the philosophy, as well as the methods, of statistics to engineers and others in the manufacturing and the service industries.
"Businessmen and engineers need to understand the benefits of applied probability and statistics; they need to understand how the methods are applied to their own work; they need to be fully converted to a frame of mind that will make them automatically question sources of variability in everything that they do and, without outside prompting, adopt the statistical approach.
He and others founded ENBIS to stimulate the application of statistical methods to economic and technical development and to business and industry across the whole of Europe. They have created a networking forum for the exchange of ideas between statistical practitioners. He has spread this passion by speaking in many cities across Europe from Tel Aviv, through Turin, Budapest, Ljubljana, Copenhagen, Brussels and London.
George Box Medal by ENBIS for Outstanding Contributions to Industrial Statistics.
William G Hunter Award by the American Society for Quality for the creative development and application of statistical techniques to problem-solving in the quality field.
The Royal Statistical Society
awards the Greenfield Industrial Medal for contributions to the effective application of statistical methods to the manufacturing and allied industries.
As for politics, Tony was sent to a public school at the age of 13 and, for five years, was shocked by the extreme right wing attitudes of the staff and boys. This made him a radical for life. He joined the Liberal Party
, eventually becoming a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate
(PPC) for Sheffield Hallam, but was faced with ideas with which he didn’t agree so he joined the Labour Party (UK)
and has been active for 20 years in the High Peak constituency.
Statistical Practice in Business and Industry (ISBN 978-0-470-01497-4) by Shirley Coleman (Editor), Tony Greenfield (Co-Editor), Dave Stewardson (Co-Editor), Douglas C. Montgomery (Co-Editor)
Design and Analyse Your Experiment Using Minitab (ISBN 978-0-340-80780-4) by Tony Greenfield, Andrew V. Metcalfe
A statistical approach to oxygen steelmaking
Discriminant analysis as a diagnostic aid
Iterative and sequential methods for sine wave fitting
Training statistical consultants for the pharmaceutical industry
Reproducibility in histopathology
Simulation is a tool for improving NHS procedures
Discriminant value of thyroid function tests (with Barnett, Howlett, Hudson and Smith)
Metabolic profile study of patients receiving lithium carbonate (with Birch)
Lithium therapy and alkaline earth metal metabolism (with Birch)
British Steel’s Research Strategy
Computers and Health
The Road to Better Diagnosis
Laboratory data on ICU admissions (with Batchelor)
Introducing computers studies to an established medical curriculum
The Medical Effects of the Seat Belt Legislation in the United Kingdom (with Rutherford)
Biometric Review and Advice to the Government of Bolivia
Communicating Statistics
Femoral neck and total body bone mineral density predict incident non-spine fractures (with Greenfield DM and Eastell R)
Simulation of clinical trials
New Scientist review of Research Methods for Postgraduates, 2nd Edition
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
statistical consultant
Statistical consultant
A statistical consultant provides statistical advice andguidance to clients interested in making decisions through theanalysis or collection of data. Clients often need statistical advice to answer questions in business, medicine, biology, genetics, forestry, agriculture, fisheries, wildlife...
and academic. He was formerly Head of Process Computing and Statistics at the British Iron and Steel Research Association, Sheffield, and Professor of Medical Computing and Statistics at Queen's University, Belfast.
He is now a visiting professor to the Industrial Statistics Research Unit of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and to the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He also assists many other universities around the world. He presents workshops, and teaches and examines post-graduate students.
Professor Greenfield recently co-authored Design and Analyse your Experiments with Minitab with Andrew Metcalfe, and is currently working on Engineering Statistics with Matlab. His inaugural lecture (1980) at Queen’s University is still sold as a booklet. His first book, Research Methods for Postgraduates is highly regarded on both sides of the Atlantic. He has also had a strong hand in The Pocket Statistician, Statistical Practice in Business and Industry and an Encyclopaedia of Statistics in Quality and Reliability. One of his contributions to his local community of Great Hucklow is the editing of a history of lead mining in the area: Lead in the Veins.
Tony is a founding member and Past President of European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics, and for many years he was a prominent member of the Royal Statistical Society
Royal Statistical Society
The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...
. He was the first editor of RSS News and of the ENBIS newsletter and magazine. In just ten years, ENBIS has grown to a membership base of around 1500 practitioners spread across more than sixty countries. Tony has made a huge contribution to the society’s magnificent achievements.
Tony is a Chartered Statistician
Chartered statistician
Chartered Statistician is a professional qualification in statistics offered by the Royal Statistical Society in the United Kingdom...
(CStat) and a Chartered Scientist
Chartered scientist
Chartered Scientist is a professional qualification in the United Kingdom that is awarded by the Science Council through its Licensed member organisations...
(CSci).
Early life
Tony Greenfield was born in Chapeltown, South YorkshireChapeltown, South Yorkshire
Chapeltown is in northern Sheffield, in South Yorkshire, England. It forms part of the Ecclesfield civil parish. There is a wide variety of shops, pubs and restaurants as well as a supermarket...
on 26th April 1931 to Geoffrey James Greenfield (1900–1978) and Hilda Aynsley (1903–1976).
Tony Greenfield worked in an iron mine when he left Bedford School
Bedford School
Bedford School is not to be confused with Bedford Modern School or Bedford High School or Old Bedford School in Bedford, TexasBedford School is an HMC independent school for boys located in the town of Bedford, England, United Kingdom...
at the age of 17. He later worked in coal mines, a brass tube factory, and in a copper mine and studied mining engineering at Imperial College London
Imperial College London
Imperial College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom, specialising in science, engineering, business and medicine...
. He received the diploma in journalism from the Regent Street Polytechnic
University of Westminster
The University of Westminster is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom. Its origins go back to the foundation of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1838, and it was awarded university status in 1992.The university's headquarters and original campus are based on Regent...
, worked on the Sunday Express and Sunday Mirror
Sunday Mirror
The Sunday Mirror is the Sunday sister paper of the Daily Mirror. It began life in 1915 as the Sunday Pictorial and was renamed the Sunday Mirror in 1963. Trinity Mirror also owns The People...
before turning to technical journalism for ten years. He was an active member of the Sheffield Junior Chamber of Commerce of which he was chairman of the Business Affairs committee and editor of The Hub, the chamber’s monthly magazine. At the 1963 conference in Tel Aviv of Junior Chamber International
Junior Chamber International
Junior Chamber International is the only worldwide non-political and non-sectarian youth service organization. It is an international community of citizens between the ages of to with the aim and purpose of creating positive changes in the world...
he was acknowledged as the editor of the best junior chamber magazine in the world.
He moved into the steel industry to write technical reports for Operations Research
Operations research
Operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations...
(OR) scientists. There he found satisfaction in solving production problems, studied OR, mathematics, statistics and computing leading to an external degree from University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
. He moved into steel research and became head of process computing and statistics. Much of his work was in design and analysis of experiments for which he received his PhD. When the laboratories closed he joined the medical faculty of University of Sheffield
University of Sheffield
The University of Sheffield is a research university based in the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. It is one of the original 'red brick' universities and is a member of the Russell Group of leading research intensive universities...
where he was statistician to a multi-centre study of cot death. He taught medical statistics to undergraduates, supported post graduates and medical staff with consultancy and co-authored one of the first interactive statistics packages to be written on Prime computers.
Career and Personal Philosophy
Tony moved to Belfast as professor of medical computing and statistics at Queen’s University.Early retirement enabled him to work as a research consultant.
Greenfield's passion is to persuade all scientists and engineers to write, speak and present their work in language that other people understand well enough to use in some ways. And, like W B Yeats, he asks scientists to "think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people." Like Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...
, he is "on fire to explain," and doesn’t "indulge in scholarly depth."
He believes strongly that the economic fortune of Europe depends on the success in the world markets of our manufacturing industries.
"Statisticians and statistical practitioners across Europe know that statistical methods have improved business and industrial performance and can continue do so in the future," he says. "Our national quality of life will be improved and secured if we can communicate the philosophy, as well as the methods, of statistics to engineers and others in the manufacturing and the service industries.
"Businessmen and engineers need to understand the benefits of applied probability and statistics; they need to understand how the methods are applied to their own work; they need to be fully converted to a frame of mind that will make them automatically question sources of variability in everything that they do and, without outside prompting, adopt the statistical approach.
He and others founded ENBIS to stimulate the application of statistical methods to economic and technical development and to business and industry across the whole of Europe. They have created a networking forum for the exchange of ideas between statistical practitioners. He has spread this passion by speaking in many cities across Europe from Tel Aviv, through Turin, Budapest, Ljubljana, Copenhagen, Brussels and London.
Awards
Chambers Medal for outstanding services to the RSS.George Box Medal by ENBIS for Outstanding Contributions to Industrial Statistics.
William G Hunter Award by the American Society for Quality for the creative development and application of statistical techniques to problem-solving in the quality field.
The Royal Statistical Society
Royal Statistical Society
The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...
awards the Greenfield Industrial Medal for contributions to the effective application of statistical methods to the manufacturing and allied industries.
Personal life
Tony is a member of the Longstone Local History Society, the Bakewell Photographic Circle, Writers in the Peak, the Hucklows Community Spirit, and the Parisot (Tarn-et-Garonne)/Hucklows Twinning Committee.As for politics, Tony was sent to a public school at the age of 13 and, for five years, was shocked by the extreme right wing attitudes of the staff and boys. This made him a radical for life. He joined the Liberal Party
Liberal Party (UK)
The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties of the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a third party of negligible importance throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, before merging with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 to form the present day...
, eventually becoming a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate
Prospective parliamentary candidate
Prospective parliamentary candidate is a term used in British politics to refer to candidates selected by political parties to fight individual constituencies in advance of a general election. This terminology was motivated by the strict limits on the amount of expenses incurred by an actual...
(PPC) for Sheffield Hallam, but was faced with ideas with which he didn’t agree so he joined the Labour Party (UK)
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...
and has been active for 20 years in the High Peak constituency.
Books
Research Methods for Postgraduates, 2nd Edition (ISBN 978-0-340-80656-2) by Tony Greenfield (Editor)Statistical Practice in Business and Industry (ISBN 978-0-470-01497-4) by Shirley Coleman (Editor), Tony Greenfield (Co-Editor), Dave Stewardson (Co-Editor), Douglas C. Montgomery (Co-Editor)
Design and Analyse Your Experiment Using Minitab (ISBN 978-0-340-80780-4) by Tony Greenfield, Andrew V. Metcalfe
Presented papers (a selection)
Computational techniques as an aid in physical metallurgy- ISI conference, Leeds 1971
A statistical approach to oxygen steelmaking
- International Steelmakers’ Conference, Amsterdam, 1973
Discriminant analysis as a diagnostic aid
- IEEE conference on ‘Computers for analysis and control in medical and biological research’ 1974
Iterative and sequential methods for sine wave fitting
- Colloquium on ‘Methods of study of biological rhythms’, Manchester 1975
Training statistical consultants for the pharmaceutical industry
- Seminar of ‘Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry’ 1979
Reproducibility in histopathology
- Conference on ‘statistics in medicine’, Sheffield 1980
Simulation is a tool for improving NHS procedures
- CQI and the NHS, BMA, October 1997
Published papers (a selection)
Technology to Pay for Tomorrow- New Scientist, August 1970
Discriminant value of thyroid function tests (with Barnett, Howlett, Hudson and Smith)
- British Medical Journal, April 1973
Metabolic profile study of patients receiving lithium carbonate (with Birch)
- British Journal of Pharmacology 1974
Lithium therapy and alkaline earth metal metabolism (with Birch)
- Psychological Medicine 1977
British Steel’s Research Strategy
- The Times, January 16, 1978
Computers and Health
- Inaugural lecture, Queen’s University, Belfast, 1980
The Road to Better Diagnosis
- Proceedings of the Hospital Physicists Association and Biological Engineering Society, 1981
Laboratory data on ICU admissions (with Batchelor)
- Anaesthesia, 1982
Introducing computers studies to an established medical curriculum
- In ‘Meeting the Challenge: Informatics and Medical Education’ - North Holland 1983
The Medical Effects of the Seat Belt Legislation in the United Kingdom (with Rutherford)
- DHSS report 1985
Biometric Review and Advice to the Government of Bolivia
- ODA report 1988
Communicating Statistics
- JRSS (A) 1993 part 2
Femoral neck and total body bone mineral density predict incident non-spine fractures (with Greenfield DM and Eastell R)
- American Society for Bone and Mineral Research, Cincinnati, September 1997
Simulation of clinical trials
- Clinical Research Manual Supplement 24 (2007), published by Euromed Communications
Sources and references
Box Medal: RSS News, December 2009, article on page 10: Tony wins ENBIS awardNew Scientist review of Research Methods for Postgraduates, 2nd Edition