Len Stefanski sent this interesting connection with the past, and I wanted to pass it along.....
You know about the Horvitz-Thompson Estimator published in 1952. But do you know about Daniel Horvitz? This little look back in time was prompted by an email that Sue Carson sent to me and Dan Solomon. You've heard about long-lost messages in a bottle, or letters lost for years behind a cabinet at a post office, but how about a long-forgotten letter trapped in a trash compactor?
********************************************************************************************************
Hi Len and Dan,
I thought the two of you might be interested in this.
We recently moved into a home built in 1956. It turns out the original owner was Daniel Horvitz, who was a faculty member in the Statistics Department and later went on to a leadership role at RTI. Dan was Jewish, and we still have his family’s mezuzahs on our doors. There is an ugly 1980s trash compactor (that I adore) in the kitchen. When my husband was emptying it out last week, he noticed a paper stuck in the top of it and pulled it out. It was this letter from 1988 (31 years ago, the year I graduated high school) thanking him for his service as a campaign chairman for the 1987 rally in Washington DC for Soviet Jews.
I just cannot believe that after two different owners living in the house between us, we were lucky enough to find this letter in the trash compactor within two months of moving in. It means a lot to me to have found it because I'm Jewish of Eastern European descent.
Letter and envelope photo attached below. Best wishes,
Sue Carson
