The Department of Statistics at Florida State University was founded in September 1959 under the initiative and direction of Ralph Bradley. Since that time it has become one of the leading statistics departments in the United States. It has been the home at one time or another to many of the pioneers of modern statistics, including Dev Basu, Jaroslav Hajek, Myles Hollander, Dennis Lindley, George Marsaglia, Frank Proschan, Richard Savage, Jayaram Sethuraman, and Frank Wilcoxon.