Dear Ellyn, dear Kyle, dear friends and colleagues of Bob Wagner,
I am very sorry I cannot be there today on this sad occasion, but my thoughts and prayers are with you.
Bob had a very large impact on my life, personally and professionally. I first met him at the 1972 meeting in Chicago that kicked off the SPIE Medical Imaging series, and he and I were very proud to get our Founding Member ribbons from SPIE 25 years later.
That meeting also kicked off a long, raucous and valuable string of interactions between Bob and me. I recall his efforts in the late seventies to get me to take a close look at statistical decision theory as a tool for defining and computing figures of merit for image quality. I had difficulty grasping what he was saying and went my own way. I even wrote a long book on radiological imaging which had lots of statistics in it, but none of the key statistical insights that Bob had been propounding for years. Only several years later did his visionary message gradually sink in, and I became a convert. After that, Bob and I worked closely together on these matters, and often argued vigorously about them, but my respect for him continued to grow. My exchanges with him, in letters and in person, had a profound influence on how I approached fundamental problems in our common field. Today, I look at my current research activities and compare them to letters I received from Bob decades ago, and I see how advanced his insights were at that time, and how slow I was in recognizing their value.
When Kyle and I finally finished Foundations of Image Science in 2003, we both felt a profound need to acknowledge Bob’s contributions and encouragement. In the first paragraph of the Acknowledgements, we wrote:
The seeds of this project can be found in the interactions of the authors with Robert F. Wagner, who more than anyone else founded the field of objective assessment of image quality, especially in regard to radiological imaging. Without his insights and guidance, neither that field nor this book would have been born.
My relationship with Bob took on a new and more personal tint when Ellyn came on the scene. Cathy and I first met Ellyn at an IPMI meeting in Flagstaff in 1993, and we were delighted to learn that she was a Tucson native and NAU grad. When Bob and Ellyn came to Tucson to visit her family over the years, they almost always made time to meet us for brunch (which meant breakfast for Bob and lunch for me). We always enjoyed Bob’s and Ellyn’s insights on history, philosophy, etymology and the politics of the day, and we hope very much to continue these brunches with Ellyn for years to come.
Dear friends, I share your sorrow and cherish my memories today. I wish I could be there to hear your memories and learn more about how Bob impacted your lives.
Harry Barrett