George E. P. Box

George Box
Born	(1919-10-18)18 October 1919 Gravesend, Kent, England
Died	28 March 2013(2013-03-28) (aged 93) Madison, Wisconsin
Residence	United Kingdom, United States
Fields	Statistics Design of experiments Bayesian statistics Time series
Institutions	ICI Princeton University University of Wisconsin–Madison
Alma mater	University College London
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	Bovas Abraham Ernesto Barrios William Hill William Hunter Johannes Ledolter Greta Ljung John F. MacGregor Duane Meeter Paul Newbold José Ramírez David Steinberg George Tiao Joanne Wendelberger
Known for	“All models are wrong” Response-surface methodology Box–Jenkins method Box–Cox transformation Box–Cox distribution Box–Pierce test Box–Behnken design Ljung–Box test
Influences	Ronald Fisher
Influenced	Norman Draper George C. Tiao
Notable 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)

George Edward Pelham Box FRS (18 October 1919 – 28 March 2013) was a British statistician, who worked in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference. He has been called "one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century".

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 the North Carolina State University at Raleigh (now North Carolina State University). 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. He was appointed Vilas Research Professor of Statistics (the highest honor accorded to any faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison) in 1980. Box and Bill Hunter co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1984. Box officially retired in 1992, becoming an Emeritus Professor.

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