Reminiscenses of Steve Fienberg

Abstract

I was fortunate enough to meet Steve at a variety of privacy workshops over the years. More than anyone I have met, he encouraged early-career researchers and showed interest in their work. Part of the reason was Steve's enthusiasm for statistical disclosure control, which comes across in every conversation. Once, he (half-jokingly) told me that everyone should be limited to lifetime total of 20 published pages, so that people focus their energies on deep progress in the problems they care about. Late in his career, Steve also mentioned that he started telling prospective students that he doesn't need to publish anymore.
Of course, he continued his research in privacy { not because he needed to, but because he wanted to. One of our shared common interests was in developing techniques for proper statistical analysis of differentially private data, and over-coming the associated computational difficulties. I am grateful for his support and encouragement -- to a first-year faculty, it means a lot when a legend tells you he had read all of your papers, and I will miss his enthusiasm.