The Statistician

I met Azza Amzellaoui at an abridged screening of Star Wars: A New Hope. I was assistant teaching an introductory class on desert ecosystems at McGill University and the cult classic, with its sandstorms and moisture farms, was a first year tradition for students of ecology.

“Tatooine is a real place,” Azza said during the class discussion. “It’s called Tataouine, and it’s just east of Tozeur in Tunisia, where I grew up.” It was an unexpected statement, and a few heads in the classroom swiveled to see who had delivered it. She had a tan complexion and dark, covered eyes.

“The original Star Wars sets are still there, littered around the Sahara, preserved intact by its blistering breath. You can even visit them.” She laughed and some of her natural reserve melted away. “It’s Tunisia’s enduring claim to fame - along with medjool dates and olive oil.” She pronounced Tunisia Tun-eh-say-ah, and the sound was so canorous that I felt at once resolutely inclined to visit the faraway country.

At the end of class she came up to introduce herself. When she spoke her name out loud, all the vowels of the alphabet spilled from the small aperture of her mouth. She explained that she was a mathematics major specializing in applied statistics. She hoped to use statistics to inform the field of conservation ecology and she politely requested that I mentor her thesis research.

She had a lively disposition and a tight, petite physique with toned muscles that flexed and extended with animation, but she spoke in carefully measured tones. “The global nature of conservation challenges requires approaches at the interface of ecology, mathematics and statistics. I am lacking a solid foundation in the former. Can you help?”

More motivated than most undergraduate students, Azza had already begun researching her thesis in her first year of school. She was investigating the risk of invasive species establishment in the St. Lawrence Seaway posed by the aquarium trade and she would use Bayesian statistics to estimate the propagule pressure of various fish species. I could think of ten TAs with more targeted expertise in conservation but I dismissed the thought and eagerly accepted the mentorship.

“Thank you,” She beamed. “Oh, and in case you have trouble, because many people do, my first name is pronounced like Lhasa - the capital of Tibet.”

“And your last?” I asked.

She raised her long lashes towards the ceiling as she thought about this. “I can’t think of anything that it sounds like.”

“What does it mean?”

“Azza means gazelle.”

A felicitous name I thought, as I watched her slender frame walk out the classroom. She looked to me like she’d be well adapted to quick-starts and moving through undergrowth. Yet, with an abashed awareness, I realized it was my heart that thumped hard in my chest, and it was me who, with heightened senses and a wary trepidation, perceived the danger of the precarious position I’d just put myself in.

***

Over that first semester and the one after that, I resigned myself to the idea of unrequited love. I was clumsy at first but then we slipped into an easy friendship prescribed, initially, by the roles of mentor and mentee. I advised her on the design of her surveys and assisted in the development of her research methods. Later, the friendship solidified, we visited together the various waterways and channels that make up the St. Lawrence River system.

From the leather seats of my two-door coupe dodge challenger we watched the river channels narrow and broaden again. Driving in the direction of increasingly brackish waters and toward the scent of seaweed, we traveled from the upper estuary below the Ile D’Orleans at Quebec, to the estuary’s lowest point at the oval-shaped marine that is the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The dodge challenger was a poor choice for the maritime provinces of Canada in winter but Azza never noticed. She was enchanted by it’s shark-like design. Even the colours, she said, the deep-water blue paint and smooth grey interior, put in mind the cool confidence of a predatory fish. She said it sliced through the fog of the coastal areas like a shark in a seaway. Whenever we stepped out of the car, she gently patted the hood as though it were the rubbery nose of a cartilaginous creature she had just tamed.

She knew a lot about sharks. Not about their biology, per say, but about the human dimensions of shark conservation. She passed the long driving hours thinking up synonyms of shark.

“Shark as in swindler, shark as in con artist, shark as in shrewd, shark as in racketeer, shark as in cheat, shark as in defrauder, shark as in crook, shark as in victimizer.”

I pointed out that sometimes “shark” suggested something positive: shark as in expert, or shark as in wizard.

“Habibiti, I wish more people thought like you.” She could not suppress the sadness in her tone. “You know,” she added, “in the year I was born, the second largest great white ever measured was caught in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. And by caught I mean it was trapped in a net. It was dead when it was pulled up to the surface. But imagine how fortuitous for those fishermen - landing that legendary haul!” She said the last part sarcastically and her eyes flashed bright and communicated contempt.

I never fully understood why she chose to study statistics and not conservation biology or ecology. She was a good statistician but she displayed a passion for conservation unlike any I’d encountered before. I asked her once, early on in our acquaintanceship, why statistics? She responded something obscure about bikinis being objectionable in Tunisia. Whether because what they reveal is suggestive or because what they conceal is vital, she was not sure - but either way, she said, “that is just like statistics, it’s kif-kif!" She left it at that, as though that was a perfectly rational and satisfactory answer. I mulled it over for weeks but never did divine what it was she meant.

Azza wasn’t your conventional statistician. To use statistical terminology: she was not a representative sample. Most people inferred from her dress, her style and her manner of speaking, that she was a fine arts major; they thought she exuded something of the painter or the poet. Perhaps it also had to do with the timbre of her voice, which had a certain hypnotizing and operatic quality to it. Once you knew her well however, it was clear to see that her rigid personality and her precise (bordering on the pedantic) pursual of subject matters was a natural fit for the exacting universe of mathematics. I too thought she would be better suited to qualitative rather than quantitative analysis - but math was Azza’s mosque.

Azza’s reaction to strangers’ misjudgments of her was always graceful but seldom gracious. She had little patience for what she called Canada’s corrosive culture of students in STEM. “Why can’t a mathematician value function as well as form?!” she’d yell forcefully to the intimates in her entourage who liked to tease and torment her.

One memory in particular burns in my mind.

One evening my brother invited me to a soirée at the Department of Fine Arts at Concordia where he taught. I brought Azza as my date. It was a classy affair à la Française, with wine and cheese and cocktail dresses. Azza’s beauty was effortless and the mass of people in the hall all seemed to stop mid sentence to watch her arrive.

My brother introduced her as the cosmopolitan young lady from McGill. Mention of Concordia's main adversary spread a hush around the room. Azza smiled generously and fingered a shrimp off a passing plate. There was a proud guffaw from a portly man who taught creative writing. “Oh! So you’re poaching her from the Ivy League are you? Well done!” He clapped my brother on the shoulder and gave Azza a wink. Azza raised an eyebrow at him in response and I could tell she was anticipating the next thing he would say. “Sure, McGill’s a worthy rival, but they can’t hold a candle to us. Isn’t that right?”

There it was.

“Hmm.” Azza tilted her chin in a way that elongated her neck. She deposited the uneaten shrimp onto a nearby table. “I’ve always found it amusing that eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above average.”

I cleared my throat. “Azza is a statistician” I announced, more formally than I’d meant to. There was an uncomfortable silence as people processed the subtle slight she had just served. Somebody coughed, and then somebody snickered.

A tall young man with red facial hair and an orange double-breasted vest spoke up first. “A Statistician?! But you’re so cultured and sophisticated - whatever convinced you to misuse your talent? I mean, math is just so … what do you do for creativity?”

My brother tried to chime in: “What I Think Tom means to convey is how terribly tragic for the arts not to -”

Azza cut him off sharply. “Well I suppose you could think of it as painting with numbers - you know? I compose stories and paintings in the language of numbers.”

“Oh God!” someone shouted exasperatedly from the back of the room.

“Ah, Ah, Ah!” Azza wagged her finger in the general direction of the guilty party, “In God we trust, all others must bring data!”

This lightened the mood greatly and apart from one episode where Azza stunned an assemblage of haughty Renaissance scholars by pointing out that their statistically predictable prejudice for the visual properties of symmetry and balance results in only moderate complexity - the remainder of the evening was cordial and convivial.

***

Almost as soon as Azza finished her research, it was selected for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. We went out one bitter cold Montreal night to celebrate this fact. As I walked towards her, she waved at me from the corner of Peel street, her feet invisible behind a week's worth of compacted snow. When I reached her she pecked me affectionately on the mouth. Her lips were gelid and silvery ice crystals were forming on her long Arabian eyelashes. She pulled her coat up against the wind and looped an arm through mine and together we walked to Pho Bac for some Vietnamese soup and buns.

Over dinner she talked excitedly about being published and laughed at how it’s true: you become what you study. “I’m a statistic now,” she said looking up from her bowl, the snow melted from her eyelashes but the steam wetting them again. “I’m the youngest McGill student to be published in The Journal of Fish Biology.”

“Azza,” I said to her - “You were already a statistic; everything you do, you do with confidence, frequency, and variability.” We laughed together. The night was light and an air of inspired anticipation wrapped us in warmth wherever the pho hadn’t reached. And yet I couldn’t suppress a creeping sense of sentimentality that warned me that soon she’d be moving on to bigger and better things.

I was right. After that she sort of just disappeared. She was offered a student position at the Bureau of Fisheries and Oceans for the remainder of the year and, shortly after that, a summer position at their headquarters in Ottawa. The summer she was away, I received some funding to complete a post doctorate in NYC at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Park, and so I left.

We lost touch entirely after that. I heard through the academic grape vine that she went to Cornell for graduate school. An old friend who teaches there told me she’d registered with the department of natural resources to pursue human dimensions in wildlife studies. The human dimensions part didn’t make any sense to me until I remembered the sharks and how passionate she’d been about them being ill perceived. I didn’t ask for any follow up information and he never offered any either. And so that was that.

Until the other night.

I was walking past the Williamsburg Hotel in Brooklyn at about one o’clock in the morning. Outside, on the cracked pavement, a jazz guitarist channeling Django Reinhardt was closing out a set. A throng of inebriated hipsters were sucking on cigarettes and swaying their hips. They lurched and rolled with such perfect reciprocity it was as if they had only one central unit of command amongst them. A small faction of them broke off and teetered on the sidewalk as I was making my way past. I stopped to let them pass me, not wanting their drunken slurring to accompany me on my way home. I caught the end of an incoherent sentence and realized they were talking about rats. Thinking there must be one nearby I looked reflexively down at my feet.

“Ugh. There must be a bajillion of them in this city.” Said one girl in the group who looked to me like she was about sixteen years old.

“There’s no way to actually gauge their population - but either way bajillion’s not a number,” retorted another who at least appeared to be a full grown woman.

“Actually," said a third, "statistical approaches CAN capture the number of rats. There are about 2 million in this city.”

That voice! My head snapped up and I thought I recognized the curve of Azza’s hip, those short legs on that slender frame. “Hey! Wait!” I called out.

Several humans turned around at once but I had my eye on the one I was certain was Azza. But when she saw me, she didn’t register knowing me. With disappointment, I realized I was wrong. “I'm sorry,” I shouted across the street, “I thought you were someone else - but that would have been an impossible coincidence.”

“Coincidence? Did you say coincidence?" She shouted back. "Understanding coincidence requires reasoning objectively about probability. And that’s kind of my thing.”

“Azza?! Is that really you?!”

“With what degree of certainty do you need to know?” She laughed and finally her eyes held mine with recognition.