Personal Comments on Yoon's Discussion of My 1957 Paper

Abstract

There is a type of art that is known as “naive,” which can be very simplistic and have a certain amount of charm. Reading about my own work on sunspots published in 1957 also brings to mind the description “naive.” I was certainly naive in thinking that I could undertake a piece of simple numerical analysis and then send it off to a major journal. The world of empirical research was then very simplistic as we had no computer at the University of Nottingham where I was employed, and all calculations had to be done on an electronic calculator and all plots by hand. It was clear that if monthly data for sunspots had been available, I would have been overwhelmed by the quantity of data! Trying to plot by hand nearly 200 years of monthly data is a lengthy task! The computing restrictions also limited the types of model that could be considered.

Citation

Granger, C.W.J. (2006), "Personal Comments on Yoon's Discussion of My 1957 Paper", Fomby, T.B. and Terrell, D. (Ed.) Econometric Analysis of Financial and Economic Time Series (Advances in Econometrics, Vol. 20 Part 2), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 315-316. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0731-9053(05)20032-4