David Ainsley Wooff, 1957–2024

Much of David's research was centred on Bayesian methodology, and, in particular, in the area termed Bayes linear Statistics.A large part of this work was collected in the volume 'Bayes linear statistics: Theory and Methods', by Goldstein and Wooff, published by Wiley (2007).David's work has always been characterized by the need to be useful, relevant, and rigorous.The last two chapters of the above volume, written solely by David, on the practical and theoretical details of the implementation of the methods described in the book (mainly on the careful treatment of the underlying matrix algebra) are excellent illustrations of these qualities.David wrote many other theoretical papers.A particular favourite was a novel and powerful approach to dimension reduction via principal variables, which appeared in a paper so titled with Jonathan Cumming in Computational Statistics & Data Analysis (2007).From 1996 to his retirement, David was the first director of the Statistics and Mathematics Consultancy Unit (SMCU) in the Mathematics department.In this period, the SMCU grew from nothing to an annual turnover of over 100,000, largely due to David's efforts and his skills as an applied statistician.This work resulted in many excellent joint publications in applied statistics, with particular emphasis on applications in medicine, mental health, and the environment.