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A R Jonckheere, a much loved and very long standing member of the Department of Psychology at University College London, known to all as Jonck, died suddenly in October 2005. This web page is a memorial to him which in particular emphasises the breadth of his scholarship, as seen so well in the breadth of reading so well displayed on his own bookshelves.
Jonck Photo I've been a post-doc in the psychology department for the past 5 years, and was fortunate to spend a lot of time with Jonck, especially over the past year. Indeed since moving into the office opposite him last year he visited me almost every weekday (always around 6pm). He'd breeze in saying 'It's only me', settle into a chair, and inspect all the papers on my desk and the books on my shelf (those that he hadn't already borrowed). He shared my interest in the latest developments in Bayesian networks, and together we'd struggle to understand the intricacies of hidden Markov models and Kalman filters. He'd devour any paper I happened to be reading, compete for library texts, and download the latest Bayes net software. Although we found it hard going, we both loved Pearl's book on Causality. It was as if we were engaged in an unspoken research project. Our discussions of statistics were interspersed with detours on philosophy of science or mind, and, of course, frequent and hilarious anecdotes that only Jonck could tell. Despite his long pedigree in statistics he was keen (even driven) to learn more. I told him that I might attend an introductory course on Bayesian statistics and he wanted to come along too. He was incredibly accommodating to anyone in the department with a stats problem and some time to kill. You'd turn up at his door with a 5 min question, and you'd emerge 3 hours later, with a magnificent 3-D plot of your data and a deeper understanding of the foundations of probability. I referred to this as being 'Joncked'. He gave his expertise, charm and wit to everyone, but never shirked from an honest but disarming answer ... or question ... one of his favourites was 'But what are you trying to do?', especially when complex statistics were involved. And many a visiting speaker was disarmed by the incisiveness of his comments ... for example, after a talk by a famed neuroscientist about the location of some cognitive function, Jonck remarked: 'Isn't this rather like peasant psychology ... whether it's at the front or back of the brain?' We were all very lucky to have Jonck around, and I feel particularly fortunate to have had such a close relationship so recently. Last week he'd only just got back from holiday, and was already checking in to see what he'd missed, and what work needed to be done. On Friday I plied him with stats questions as he rushed off for a dinner date. The last thing he said to me was 'We'll sort it all out on Monday'.