David Spiegelhalter

BA Mathematics 1971
OBE FRS
Honorary Fellow

David Spiegelhalter is a rarity—a statistician who has a high public profile. During the Covid pandemic he became a media fixture, and ended up fulfilling a life’s ambition of appearing on Desert Island Discs.

He studied mathematics at Keble in the early 1970s, and was fortunate to have Adrian Smith (later Sir Adrian, President of the Royal Society) as his tutor, who guided him into Bayesian statistics when the pure maths got too hard. He later worked for the Medical Research Council, both developing the methodology which made him one of most highly-cited mathematical scientists in the world, and also becoming involved in two major public inquiries, concerning the Bristol heart babies and serial murderer Harold Shipman. After retiring as the first (and only) Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, he established the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, which aims to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers and judges, media and policy-makers.

He presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, and the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. Among his books, The Art of Statistics became a bestseller, being translated into 11 languages. He has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, awarded an OBE, knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, and was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017–2018). But undoubtedly the peak of his career occurred in 2011, when he came 7th in an episode of BBC1’s Winter Wipeout.

“At Keble I developed an enthusiasm for the ideas behind probability and statistics, honed from hours of discussion in the Lamb and Flag. These ideas are still an important part of my life—as are many of the friends I met while I was there”.