Tony Greenfield

Early life

Tony Greenfield was born in Chapeltown, South Yorkshire on 26 April 1931 to Geoffrey James Greenfield (1900–1978) and Hilda Aynsley (1903–1976).

Tony Greenfield worked in an iron mine when he left Bedford School at the age of 17. He later worked in coal mines, a brass tube factory, and in a copper mine and studied mining engineering at Imperial College London. He received the diploma in journalism from the Regent Street Polytechnic, worked on the Sunday Express and Sunday Mirror before turning to technical journalism for ten years. He was an active member of the Sheffield Junior Chamber of Commerce of which he was chairman of the Business Affairs committee and editor of The Hub, the chamber's monthly magazine. At the 1963 conference in Tel Aviv of Junior Chamber International he was acknowledged as the editor of the best junior chamber magazine in the world.

He moved into the steel industry to write technical reports for Operations Research (OR) scientists. There he found satisfaction in solving production problems, studied OR, mathematics, statistics and computing leading to an external degree from University College London. He moved into steel research and became head of process computing and statistics. Much of his work was in design and analysis of experiments for which he received his PhD. When the laboratories closed he joined the medical faculty of University of Sheffield where he was statistician to a multi-centre study of cot death. He taught medical statistics to undergraduates, supported post graduates and medical staff with consultancy and co-authored one of the first interactive statistics packages to be written on Prime computers.

Career

Tony moved to Belfast as professor of medical computing and statistics at Queen's University. Early retirement enabled him to work as a research consultant.

Greenfield's passion is to persuade all scientists and engineers to write, speak and present their work in language that other people understand well enough to use in some ways. And, like W B Yeats, he asks scientists to "think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people." Like Isaac Asimov, he is "on fire to explain," and doesn't "indulge in scholarly depth."

He believes strongly that the economic fortune of Europe depends on the success in the world markets of our manufacturing industries.

"Statisticians and statistical practitioners across Europe know that statistical methods have improved business and industrial performance and can continue do so in the future," he says. "Our national quality of life will be improved and secured if we can communicate the philosophy, as well as the methods, of statistics to engineers and others in the manufacturing and the service industries.

"Businessmen and engineers need to understand the benefits of applied probability and statistics; they need to understand how the methods are applied to their own work; they need to be fully converted to a frame of mind that will make them automatically question sources of variability in everything that they do and, without outside prompting, adopt the statistical approach.

He and others founded ENBIS to stimulate the application of statistical methods to economic and technical development and to business and industry across the whole of Europe. They have created a networking forum for the exchange of ideas between statistical practitioners. He has spread this passion by speaking in many cities across Europe from Tel Aviv, through Turin, Budapest, Ljubljana, Copenhagen, Brussels and London.

Awards

Personal life

Tony is a member of the Longstone Local History Society, the Bakewell Photographic Circle, Writers in the Peak, the Hucklows Community Spirit, and the Parisot (Tarn-et-Garonne)/Hucklows Twinning Committee.

As for politics, Tony was sent to a public school at the age of 13 and, for five years, was shocked by the extreme right wing attitudes of the staff and boys. This made him a radical for life. He joined the Liberal Party, eventually becoming a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) for Sheffield Hallam, but was faced with ideas with which he didn't agree so he joined the Labour Party (UK) and has been active for 20 years in the High Peak constituency.

Books

Research Methods for Postgraduates, 2nd Edition (ISBN 978-0-340-80656-2) by Tony Greenfield (Editor)

Statistical Practice in Business and Industry (ISBN 978-0-470-01497-4) by Shirley Coleman (Editor), Tony Greenfield (Co-Editor), Dave Stewardson (Co-Editor), Douglas C. Montgomery (Co-Editor)

Design and Analyse Your Experiment Using Minitab (ISBN 978-0-340-80780-4) by Tony Greenfield, Andrew V. Metcalfe

Presented papers (a selection)

Computational techniques as an aid in physical metallurgy

A statistical approach to oxygen steelmaking

Discriminant analysis as a diagnostic aid

Iterative and sequential methods for sine wave fitting

Training statistical consultants for the pharmaceutical industry

Reproducibility in histopathology

Simulation is a tool for improving NHS procedures

Published papers (a selection)

Technology to Pay for Tomorrow

Discriminant value of thyroid function tests (with Barnett, Howlett, Hudson and Smith)

Metabolic profile study of patients receiving lithium carbonate (with Birch)

Lithium therapy and alkaline earth metal metabolism (with Birch)

British Steel's Research Strategy

Computers and Health

The Road to Better Diagnosis

Laboratory data on ICU admissions (with Batchelor)

Introducing computers studies to an established medical curriculum

The Medical Effects of the Seat Belt Legislation in the United Kingdom (with Rutherford)

Biometric Review and Advice to the Government of Bolivia

Communicating Statistics

Femoral neck and total body bone mineral density predict incident non-spine fractures (with Greenfield DM and Eastell R)

Simulation of clinical trials