An Accidental Statistician: The Life and Memories of George E. P. Box

“What sort of people live here?”

Chapter Seventeen

Journeys to Scandinavia

My connection to Norway began when I met Arnljot and Liv Høyland, who spent the 1987–1988 academic year in Madison. Both statisticians, they attended the Monday Night Beer Sessions, and we became friends. The next year they invited Søren, Conrad, and me to give our “Design of Industrial Experiments” short course in Trondheim. There we met another statistician, John Tyssedal, who told me recently that many who attended the course were surprised by our approach, which was well received. John and I became friends and wrote a paper together.¹

In Trondheim, we enjoyed sitting by the harbor where a shrimp boat had tied up to the pier and was offering fresh shrimp that had just been cooked on board. It was delicious. A less pleasant sight was a huge bunker where the Germans had hidden their U boats under extremely thick layers of virtually unmovable concrete.

In 1995, I returned to Trondheim to give a course on “The Scientific Context of Quality Improvement.” By chance we met a man named Jürgen Ahrend, who was staying at the same hotel. He had restored many historical organs in churches and cathedrals all over the world and was completing the restoration of one of the organs in the historically significant Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim. The organ was built in 1738–1740 by Johann Joachim Wagner, Bach's contemporary, and a leading organ builder in the late baroque era. During the German occupation, the people at ...