Professor Kim KI Young’s Last Lecture

통계학과 2 학년 전성배

With family, companion and student, Professor Kim Ki Young opened a speech by introducing his profile, assisted by Professor Huh.

Professor Kim, born in 1947 in the head family of Kim in Kang-Reung, entered the Department of Statistics in Korea University when he was 21. After finishing his undergraduate, he got the master’s degree in 1973. He has 2 children between his wife, Lee Geum Jae ？ who is a daughter of an orchard in his region ？ and went to the States for getting the doctoral degree. His major is multivariate statistical analysis and constantly put the effort to link Psychology with Statistics.

Now he retired, after serving for nearly 30 years as Professor. Not only he was active as a Professor, but during his tenure he also assumed editor and executive director of KSS. He rejected many official job as head of an organization, which represents his character as a distinguished person out of position with power. Professor Kim was a graceful scholar, who has interest with diverse fields; such as Buddhism, mountain and farming. As a sincere believer of Buddhism, he has a Buddhist name “Mu-ui-ja”, which means a person without depending on anything.

After introducing his profile, Professor Park ？ the 3 rd disciple of Prof. Kim ？ briefly told about his memory with his best teacher. “Now Professor Kim is this much kind, but definitely not in the past. He was once a harsh teacher with often scolding his pupils and was really strict.” He said. And he added with being closed to tears, “Now I’m the one who is really harsh on my students and I think that is attributed to emulating my teacher.” Watching this scene, I could feel how he is sad and sorry for his greatest teacher retiring from bottom of his heart.

Followed by a touching speech, Professor Kang from Department of Politics and International Relation, had bright up the atmosphere. He told he and Professor Kim’s friendship as companion dated up to 30 years from now. And his faith of not to assume position as head of the department might came from his eager to further study. In these reasons, Professor Kang appreciated Professor Kim’s ardor for study and regard his junior colleague, adding that to satisfy in one role as a professor, unlike many other professors, should be regarded very noble.

At his last lecture, Professor Kim tried to approach statistics relating with enlightenment and concept of Buddhism, which was very impressive and revealing of his interest about the link between diverse studies. Lastly, his main topic throughout the lecture was “causal sequence” and “change”. He mentioned that one of the basic notions of Statistics, “change”, is also one of the lessons of Buddha. And he show us a poem ‘ 연화무상 ’ written by himself, which is related to ‘change’,

  Professor closed his speech stating that he is such a happy person who has met marvelous people around him through his job, and truly graceful to them for being supportive to him. As saying “Saying goodbye is always hard in any moment”, he replaced his feeling with poem written by Go Eun.