mathematics

Terry Speed

Terry Speed is a mathematics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Terry Speed rather than just read about it. In short: Terence Paul "Terry" Speed (born 14 March 1943 in Victor Harbor, South Australia), FAA FRS is an Australian statistician. A senior principal research scientist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, he is known for his contributions to the analysis of variance and bioinformatics, and in particular to the analysis of microarray data.

Key takeaways

Terry Speed belongs to mathematics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Terry Speed to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Terry Speed from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Terence Paul "Terry" Speed (born 14 March 1943 in Victor Harbor, South Australia), FAA FRS is an Australian statistician. A senior principal research scientist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, he is known for his contributions to the analysis of variance and bioinformatics, and in particular to the analysis of microarray data.

Early life and education Terry Speed was born in Victor Harbor, in South Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In 1961, he started a joint degree in medicine and science at the University of Melbourne, but later focussed on science only, obtaining a honours degree in mathematics and statistics in 1964. Speed obtained a Ph.D. from Monash University in 1968 with a thesis titled Some topics in the theory of distributive lattices under the supervision of Peter D. Finch.

Career After his PhD, Terry Speed took a lecturing position in Sheffield (United Kingdom), at the Manchester-Sheffield School of Probability and Statistics. In 1974, he returned to Australia, becoming assistant professor at the University of Western Australia, heading the statisticians in the department of mathematics. He then became professor in 1975 and head of department in 1982. In 1984, Terry Speed became chief of the division of mathematics and statistics at CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. After a two-month visit in the department of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1984, he applied for a permanent position and became a tenured professor there in 1987. In 1996, Suzanne Cory, director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), in Melbourne and former high-school classmate of Speed, invited him to start a bioinformatics group at the institute. Starting in 1997, he shared his time between the two institutions. In 2009, he retired from the University of California, Berkeley, while keeping academic collaborations with the university, including the supervision of PhD students and postdocs. He started working full time at WEHI, where he was head of the Bioinformatics division until 31 August 2014, and has remained a laboratory head since then. He also served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009 and 2010. In 2016, a former colleague and a former post-doctoral researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, filed a complaint of sexual harassment against Speed, with the allegedly infringing behavior occurring in 2002. Speed has supervised at least 72 research students.

Notable work Terry Speed has contributed to a wide range of subjects, including distributive lattices, ring theory, analysis of variance and bioinformatics, and in particular to the analysis of microarray data.

Expert witness Speed was an expert witness for the defense of O.J. Simpson at the trial for the O. J. Simpson murder case, as well as an expert witness in the Imanishi-Kari case, an affair of alleged scientific misconduct which involved biologist David Baltimore. Much earlier in his career, he was an expert defence witness in the 1966 trial of Ronald Ryan, the last person executed in Australia; however, his evidence that Ryan must have been at least 2.55 metres tall (he was only 1.73 metres) to fire the fatal shot failed to sway the jury.

Awards and honours In 1989 Speed was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Speed was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2004. In 2002, he received the Pitman medal. In 2009 he was awarded a NHMRC Australia Fellowship. On 30 October 2013, he received the Australian Prime Minister's Prize for Science. Speed was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) of London in 2013. His nomination reads: Speed is regarded internationally as THE expert on the analysis of microarray data. This results partly from the sheer ingenuity of his work, and in part it is due to his commitment to working closely with biomedical scientists, enabling him to appreciate first-hand the biological challenges and the consequent requirements of new methodology. Microarrays are now being replaced by short-read DNA sequencing, but Speed continues to contribute new ideas for the new technology. At other time in his career, Speed has made seminal contributions to bioinformatics, statistical genetics, the analysis of designed experiments, graphical models and Bayes networks.

Personal life Speed married Freda Elizabeth (Sally) Pollard in 1964.

References

External links Interview with Terry Speed, by Jean Yang. Amstat News, 1 September 2016.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Terry Speed

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Terry Speed claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In mathematics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Terry Speed before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Terry Speed ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Terry Speed

In research: Terry Speed appears in mathematics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Terry Speed in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Terry Speed is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1943 births, Australian bioinformaticians, Australian fellows of the Royal Society, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Terry Speed outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Terry Speed in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Terry Speed means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Terry Speed out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Terry Speed in simple terms?

Why does Terry Speed matter?

Because it connects several mathematics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Terry Speed?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Terry Speed.