Tom Wonnacott was one of the founding members of the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at the University of Western Ontario when it was created in 1980. Tom was born in London, Ontario, in 1935 and took his undergraduate degree from Western. He went to Princeton University for his PhD, studying under the famous statistician John Tukey. After he obtained his doctorate in 1963, he taught for a couple of years in the United States. Then, he returned to Western for a faculty position in statistics in the Department of Mathematics.
Early in his career, Tom decided to follow his great passion for teaching and eschew research. He continued to offer simple, practical, and easy-to-understand statistical advice to other researchers who needed help with statistics. Tom’s dedication to teaching went in two directions: classroom teaching and textbook writing.
Tom’s approach to classroom teaching had a physical element. When he returned from class, he was often covered in chalk, almost from head to foot. He gestured with his hands, scratched his head or face, and sometimes jumped up on desks to make points. When the university decided that chalk was too messy and replaced chalk and blackboards with black felt markers and whiteboards, Tom would return from class with his face covered in black ink.
The “Rate My Professors” website can be vicious, cruel, and unfair. Its treatment of Tom was no exception because Tom was an original thinker with a unique approach to teaching. One student who understood Tom wrote an anonymous review that epitomizes Tom’s approach:
I took Tom’s stats class in 2002. He influenced me & my critical thinking more than any other prof I’ve had. His lecture style is Socratic, and so the lessons are more conversation like. So do yourself a favour & don’t worry about the notes too much, just relax, listen & think. He’ll lead you to the point eventually, & it’ll all make sense. Cheers.
His critical thinking went beyond the classroom and onto examination papers. Fairly early in his career, Tom experimented with multiple-choice exams. To handle guessing on the exam, students were asked how confident they felt about their answers. Students with high confidence in a question they answered correctly were rewarded, while students reporting high confidence but with an incorrect answer were penalized more than those who reported low confidence and an incorrect answer. It was not a hit with the students. What became a hit was Tom’s approach to long answer questions. To eliminate getting frustrated by reading through a lot of irrelevant material to find some way of awarding part marks to a question, students were given 20% of the mark on a question if they admitted that they did not know the answer and left it blank. He also applied the idea to multiple-choice exams to eliminate students guessing. One colleague, James Adcock recalled that when it came to running the exams, often in a multi-section course for 500 students, he was the model of efficiency as course coordinator.
When the department decided to offer first-year courses in statistics, Tom designed and taught a course on statistical concepts. It was inspired by Moore and Notz’s Statistics: Concepts and Controversies. Tom taught the course for several years. Another colleague, Doug Woolford, took the course as an undergraduate student in his fourth year, thinking it would be easy. The realization was different from the expectation. In Woolford’s words, “It turned out to be a great course to take in the last year of my undergrad because of how he taught it and how it reinforced and explained concepts behind the math and theory I had been seeing in my other courses.”
Tom’s greatest success was in textbook writing, many of which he wrote with his brother Ron, who held a position in the Department of Economics at Western. Their Introductory Statistics raised the bar for statistics texts when it first appeared in 1969. When the book first came out, R. W. Blackmore, a reviewer in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society wrote:
The subjects covered are those typically found in such introductory books plus a number which are usually omitted but which are of interest to a broad audience: multiple comparisons, multiple regression, Bayesian decisions, and game theory. Topical examples, such as the interpretation of opinion polls, provide an entree and theme for whole subjects, thereby maintaining interest by developing and extending ideas around the same example. The text itself is kept simple with the more difficult interpretations and developments reserved for footnotes and starred sections. In this way the book provides an introductory text for students with or without calculus. In all, an excellent and very readable introductory work suitable for any student wishing to obtain a good grasp of the subject.
I came across Introductory Statistics in 1972 while in a statistics master’s program. It was the best introductory book I had seen, and I wished it had been on the syllabus when I took my first statistics course. Although today, many of the examples used in the latest edition of Tom’s book are outdated, the book still provides some of the best explanations of statistical methods.
Tom had many interests outside of statistics. On campus, he developed an interest in demography, regularly attending colloquium discussions of Western’s Centre for Population Studies. He loved to discuss a wide range of issues with his colleagues in his home department, just not statistical theory. He based most of his arguments on utilitarian philosophy and utility theory. Discussions with him could be maddening. If you disagreed with his position, he was so brilliant and solid in his utilitarian assumptions that it was very difficult to argue against him. Off campus, his interests included singing, playing his violin, and international folk dancing—and he was good at these activities. Very early in his career, he was a violinist with what much later became Orchestra London. With the violin, he combined his interests on and off campus. For a couple of years, he organized a string quartet that played Friday afternoons tucked away in a corner of the second floor of the Western Science Centre.
After his mandatory retirement around the turn of the millennium, Tom continued to teach part time in the department for several years and then retired fully from teaching. He passed away on July 6, 2024, at the age of 88. He leaves behind his wife, Elizabeth, seven children, and 13 grandchildren.
Written by David Bellhouse