George E. P. Box

He has been called "one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century".

George Box FRS
Born	(1919-10-18)18 October 1919 Gravesend, Kent, England
Died	28 March 2013(2013-03-28) (aged 93) Madison, Wisconsin
Alma mater	University College London
Known for	“All models are wrong” Response-surface methodology EVOP q-exponential distribution Box–Jenkins method Box–Cox transformation Box–Tidwell transformation Box–Behnken design Box–Cox distribution Box–Muller transform Box–Pierce test Box's M test Ljung–Box test
Awards	Shewhart Medal (1968) Wilks Memorial Award (1972) R. A. Fisher Lectureship (1974) FRS (1985) Guy Medal (silver, 1964) (Gold, 1993) George Box Medal (2003)
Scientific career
Fields	Statistics
Institutions	ICI Princeton University University of Wisconsin–Madison
Thesis	Departures from Independence and Homoskedasticity in the Analysis of Variance and Related Statistical Analysis  (1953)
Doctoral advisor	Egon Pearson H. O. Hartley
Doctoral students	John F. MacGregor Greta M. Ljung

He was born in Gravesend, Kent, England. Upon entering university he began to study chemistry, but was called up for service before finishing. During World War II, he performed experiments for the British Army exposing small animals to poison gas. To analyze the results of his experiments, he taught himself statistics from available texts. After the war, he enrolled at University College London and obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics. He received a PhD from the University of London in 1953, under the supervision of Egon Pearson.

From 1948 to 1956, Box worked as a statistician for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). While at ICI, he took a leave of absence for a year and served as a visiting professor at North Carolina State University at Raleigh. He later went to Princeton University where he served as Director of the Statistical Research Group.

In 1960, Box moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to create the Department of Statistics. In 1980, he was named Vilas Research Professor of Statistics, which is the highest honor given to a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty. Box and Bill Hunter co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985. Box officially retired in 1992, becoming an emeritus professor.

Box published books including Statistics for Experimenters (2nd ed., 2005), Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control (4th ed., 2008, with Gwilym Jenkins and Gregory C. Reinsel) and Bayesian Inference in Statistical Analysis. (1973, with George Tiao).

Box served as president of the American Statistical Association in 1978 and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1979. He received the Shewhart Medal from the American Society for Quality Control in 1968, the Wilks Memorial Award from the American Statistical Association in 1972, the R. A. Fisher Lectureship in 1974, and the Guy Medal in Gold from the Royal Statistical Society in 1993. Box was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1985.

His name is associated with results in statistics such as Box–Jenkins models, Box–Cox transformations, Box–Behnken designs, and others. Additionally, Box famously wrote, in various books and papers, that "all models are wrong, but some are useful".

Box married Jessie Ward in 1945. In 1959, Box married Joan Fisher, the second of Ronald Fisher's five daughters. In 1978, Joan Fisher Box published a biography of Ronald Fisher, with substantial collaboration with Box. Box married Claire Louise Quist in 1985.

Box died on 28 March 2013. He was 93 years old.

• Box, G.E.P, Cox, D.R. (1964) "An Analysis of Transformations". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 26 (2): 211–252.