Simon Wood works as a Professor of Statistics at the University of Bath and currently holds an established research fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. He is author of the widely used R package mgcv for smooth statistical modelling and the book Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R, as well as a number of well-cited papers on associated statistical methods. Originally trained in physics, before a spell in theoretical ecology, he has twenty years' experience of teaching statistics at undergraduate and postgraduate level, including teaching the '...