Pat Altham

MA (Cantab), PhD (Cantab)

College roles

Fellow Emerita

Biography

Dr Patricia Altham came up to Newnham to read Mathematics in 1961 and graduated in 1964. 

She was greatly helped by Newnham Fellows Sheila Edmonds and Violet Cane. She proceeded to the Diploma in Mathematical Statistics course, in which she gained a Distinction. She was then lucky enough to gain a job as statistician in the MRC Applied Psychology Unit, while at the same time pursuing a PhD in Bayesian methods for multinomial data. 

For data analysis in her Diploma year, the dear old calculating machines in use were the vintage Brunsvigas and Facits, now museum pieces. In her MRC job, she tried to help the psychologists to analyse their data by using the University’s pioneering TITAN machine.

Serious computing in those early days required typing one’s program (in Cambridge autocode) on paper tape, carrying this tape to the old Maths Lab in the centre of town, returning some hours later to pick up the results, or more probably to find that one’s program hadn’t worked, so the paper tape had to be retyped…..and so on! (The exercise kept one fit.)

In 1970 she gained her PhD, a Research Fellowship at Newnham, and a University post in the Statistical Laboratory, where she continued to work until her retirement in 2005.

A central part of her university job was as Director of Studies for the Diploma course, in particular applying for funding for the students and allocating this funding (in those old days from the SRC). 

She also had to find suitable Applied Projects, these being a requirement of the course. This task was challenging but fun and made much easier as it was also part of her job to be available for statistical consulting, usually from other university departments. Thus there were Projects for the students to analyse data in a variety of subjects…… Astronomy, Genetics, Psychology, Economics, History of Population studies, Animal Behaviour, Criminology, and so on. The first projects in Finance came on the scene in 1992 (mainly through the goodwill of former students now in the City).

As a sideline, starting in 1966, she generally supervised groups of students on certain statistical courses within the Maths Tripos, often finding she was supervising very bright individuals who (perhaps unwittingly) taught her a lot on these relatively new courses. Of course now she fully realises that it was a privilege to teach some very bright students. For the graduate courses in those days of continuous improvements in computing, it was pretty much a joint learning process, for the students and herself! Indeed, she was very pleased that from 1998, she could use the free, elegant and efficient language R for her Part II undergraduate course. And of course, she is still more pleased that nearly 30 years later, R is still in use.