Thomas B. Fomby's Homepage

Thomas B. Fomby, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics

Department of Economics
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, TX 75275-0491
E-mail at mailto:TFOMBY@SMU.EDU

Professor Fomby received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Missouri, Columbia. His current research interests include time series forecasting, especially seasonal time series, and the use of econometric methods in financial modelling and marketing research.

Some quotes to think about:

"The best thing for being sad ... is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags for it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you."
Merlyn to the young King Arthur, in The Once and Future King, T.H. White.

"You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."
John W. Backus, Developer of Fortran, 1924 - 2007.

"When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness."
David McCullough, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of Truman and John Adams. Quoted in Harvard Business Review, January-February, 2013, p. 148.

"I was originally drawn to the study of economics because of my concern over the misery and devastation of my native country ... I hoped that what I learned might help to improve living conditions there. As a student, however, I encountered numerous conflicts between economic theory and real world phenomena. Over time I acquired a deep conviction that economic research should be rigorous but policy relevant and that it must reflect an appreciation of empirical evidence as well as of economic theory."
Professor Tong Hun Lee, The Collected Papers of Tong Hun Lee, Yonsei University Press, 1993, p. ix.

"Economists often look at data to test implications of theoretical economic models or otherwise learn about agents' response to varied incentives or other economic behavior. Note, however, that it is not possible to learn "truth" from data; typically, the best that one can hope for is to make a probability statement about the phenomenon of interest after examining data. Statistical and econometric theory are essential for quantifying what can be learned from data."
Professor Paul W. Wilson, Course Outline for Econometrics I, Clemson University, 2015.

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work together to change a small portion of events, and in the total of those acts will be written the history of our generations.”

Robert F. Kennedy

“Mathematics should be studied if only because it orders the mind."

M.V. Lomonosov, 1711 - 1765