Mr. President, Fellows of the RSS, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is indeed a great honour and a privilege to be awarded the 2007 Guy medal in Silver, which I accept with humility, especially when I recall some of the household names on the list of past recipients. As a time series analyst, I am most encouraged by our august society in giving the subject such a high recognition.
I think I am a most lucky man because I have benefited greatly from two cultures; here I am not only thinking of the Chinese culture and the English culture, but also Statistics on the one hand and Deterministic Dynamical Systems on the other. In many ways, my paper on threshold auto-regressive models, to which our President referred a few minutes ago, can be regarded as a multi-cultural product.
My lucky journey started almost exactly 46 years ago when my late father sent me to join him here in London from that little island called Hong Kong in July 1961. Two years later, he used the bulk of his life savings as a waiter to send me to UMIST as it was then called. I only wish that he could be here to witness tonight’s happy event and to hear me say publicly, “Thanks, Dad!”
The second lucky event took place in 1970 when I was offered my first proper academic post by UMIST shortly after I started my doctoral programme. I would therefore like to thank UMIST and my former colleagues there for giving me this opportunity. As you know, my threshold paper was published when I was there.
I would also like to thank all my collaborators for their willingness to put up with me. The list is very long indeed. Please allow me to mention specially Kung-sik Chan, Nils Christian Stenseth, Qiwei Yao and Wenyang Zhang.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my wife for reminding me that honour might be good but work of lasting value is better.
Thank you all!
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