I have enjoyed two trips with Manfred. The first was to Rennes. We developed statistical software (in R) and we were to present it at a conference. It was a great adventure for me, as I was still a student who had attended few conferences before. I remember the midnight sessions, frantically working to program new features, and to improve performance. Making it the best we could. But I also remember the open conversations we had, about family, about mental illness. About unconventional paths into university.

The second trip it was only Manfred travelling, as he came to visit me in Stockholm. Again, we were to work on a statistical software project and this time we thought it would be easy. How wrong we were. We worked days on end without getting any closer. Long days trying all kinds of angles, but everything we tried failed. At the end of another long weekend-day of relentlessly failing to solve our puzzle, and just in time before our frustration reached a boiling point, we decided to take a break and go for dinner. And just like that, over a steak, we had our breakthrough. Manfred matched my vague intuition with the expertise to come to a formal solution. It’s the moment captured in this photo. The excitement! We raced home to do more testing, and early in the next morning Manfred confirmed: We nailed it!

This is how I will remember Manfred. I enjoyed working with him so much, and he was a fantastic teacher. Driven to be the best, energetic to get everything right. A very friendly guy, into good music. He loved his job and continued teaching even when he got sick. He had the unique ability to talk about statistics to very different audiences: complex scientific debates on statistical methods, motivating reluctant students to learn statistics, and entertaining a crowd at a music festival with a lesson on probability theory (‘This can’t be a coincidence!’). He could be stubborn and short-tempered when things didn’t work out. And Manfred was very involved when it came to personal matters. At my graduation, he spoke about what my family was going through, how death comes ‘unexpectedly and deviously’.

His e-mail, this summer, came as a shock. Braintumor. I’m grateful that we still had the chance to exchange a few emails, and share some memories. Manfred approached his death without remorse, and lived his final days in the moment. He enjoyed these days, undertaking adventures with a group of friends, and even gave a hashtag to the whole process, in Dutch and untranslatable: #derannn.

I have had the pleasure of providing minor assistance to this book, so please let me introduce it here. Admittedly I’m not impartial on this one, but I sincerely believe this book to be an asset to introductory statistics courses and those who have to interpret or perform statistics, without the need of knowing all about the mathematical niceties.

With the focus on practical application rather than statistical theory, the first chapter starts explaining the goal of inferential statistics, meanwhile introducing the concepts of measurement and variables. Considerable attention is paid to the importance of high quality data to perform your analyses on. The second chapter deals with descriptive statistics, both in a numerical and a graphical way. Here, also the concepts of a distribution and of correlation are introduced. The third and final chapter discusses the testing of hypotheses, using techniques as the cross-table, tests for means and proportions, various forms of correlation, and finally multiple regression.

Clearly, the setup of this book is what one might expect from an introduction to statistics. However, I think this book has a unique approach by its strong focus on the conceptual level, rather than the (mathematical) statistical theory. Nevertheless, it does not shy away from relatively complex subjects such as the multiple regression. Even on the conceptual level, it pays a lot of attention to the assumptions required for the various analyses discussed. The practical approach of this book is enhanced even further, because all examples come from ‘real life’ research. On the accompanying website SPSS data files and syntax files are made available, so that every example from the book can be repeated by the reader.

Aimed at the novice statistics student, this book offers a comprehensible and conceptual approach at statistics. It will surely help students of statistics to grasp what they’re actually doing when pushing SPSS’s buttons or trying to interpret published figures. In that sense, I think that for many statistics student, this book successfully reaches is goal of transforming statistics form an abstract undertaking to an actually useful and applicable tool.