Sir David Roxbee Cox (15 July 1924 – 18 January 2022) was a British statistician and educator. His wide-ranging contributions to the field of

statistics Statistics (from German: '' Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, indust ...

included introducing

logistic regression In statistics, the logistic model (or logit model) is a statistical model that models the probability of an event taking place by having the log-odds for the event be a linear combination of one or more independent variables. In regression an ...

, the

proportional hazards model Proportional hazards models are a class of survival models in statistics. Survival models relate the time that passes, before some event occurs, to one or more covariates that may be associated with that quantity of time. In a proportional haza ...

and the Cox process, a point process named after him. He was a professor of statistics at

Birkbeck College, London , mottoeng = Advice comes over nightTranslation used by Birkbeck. , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £4.3 m (2014) , budget = £10 ...

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

and the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, and served as

Warden A warden is a custodian, defender, or guardian. Warden is often used in the sense of a watchman or guardian, as in a prison warden. It can also refer to a chief or head official, as in the Warden of the Mint. ''Warden'' is etymologically identic ...

Nuffield College, Oxford Nuffield College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is a graduate college and specialises in the social sciences, particularly economics, politics and sociology. Nuffield is one of Oxford's newer c ...

. The first recipient of the International Prize in Statistics, he also received the Guy,

George Box George Edward Pelham Box (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 gr ...

and Copley medals, as well as a

knighthood A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a head of state (including the Pope) or representative for service to the monarch, the church or the country, especially in a military capacity. Knighthood finds origins in the ...

Early life

Cox was born in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the We ...

on 15 July 1924. His father was a

die Die, as a verb, refers to death, the cessation of life. Die may also refer to: Games * Die, singular of dice, small throwable objects used for producing random numbers Manufacturing * Die (integrated circuit), a rectangular piece of a semicondu ...

sinker and part-owner of a jewellery shop, and they lived near the Jewellery Quarter. The aeronautical engineer

Harold Roxbee Cox Harold Roxbee Cox, Baron Kings Norton (6 June 1902 – 21 December 1997) was a British aeronautical engineer. He was notable for his contributions to British industry, particularly aeronautical engineering, and for his part in the establishment ...

was a distant cousin. He attended

Handsworth Grammar School King Edward VI Handsworth Grammar School for Boys, formerly and commonly Handsworth Grammar School, is a grammar school that admits boys from the age of eleven (as well as girls in the sixth form, since September 1997). The school was founded i ...

, Birmingham. He received a

Master of Arts A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...

in mathematics at

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge founded by the Tudor matriarch Lady Margaret Beaufort. In constitutional terms, the college is a charitable corporation established by a charter dated 9 April 1511. The ...

, and obtained his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * '' Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. al ...

from the

University of Leeds , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

in 1949, advised by

Henry Daniels Henry Ellis Daniels FRS (2 October 1912 – 16 April 2000) was a British statistician. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society (1974–1975), and was awarded its Guy Medal in Gold in 1984, following a silver medal in 1947. He beca ...

and Bernard Welch. His dissertation was entitled ''Theory of Fibre Motion''.

Career

Cox was employed from 1944 to 1946 at the

Royal Aircraft Establishment The Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) was a British research establishment, known by several different names during its history, that eventually came under the aegis of the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), before finally losing its identity in me ...

, from 1946 to 1950 at the

Wool Industries Research Association The Wool Industries Research Association was an industrial research organization in the United Kingdom. It later became the Wira Technology Group before being merged with the Shirley Institute in the 1989 to form the British Textile Technology Group ...

in Leeds, and from 1950 to 1955 worked at the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. From 1956 to 1966 he was Reader and then Professor of Statistics at

Birkbeck College, London , mottoeng = Advice comes over nightTranslation used by Birkbeck. , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £4.3 m (2014) , budget = £10 ...

. In 1966, he took up the Chair position in Statistics at

where he later became head of the mathematics department. In 1988 he became Warden of

Nuffield College Nuffield College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is a graduate college and specialises in the social sciences, particularly economics, politics and sociology. Nuffield is one of Oxford's newer c ...

and a member of the Department of Statistics at

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

. He formally retired from these positions in 1994, but continued to work at Oxford. Cox supervised, collaborated with, and encouraged many notable researchers prominent in statistics. He collaborated with

on a study of transformations such as the

Box–Cox transformation In statistics, a power transform is a family of functions applied to create a monotonic transformation of data using power functions. It is a data transformation technique used to stabilize variance, make the data more normal distribution-like ...

and they were especially delighted to be credited as Box and Cox. He was the doctoral advisor of

David Hinkley David Victor Hinkley (10 September 1944 – 11 January 2019) was a statistician known for his research in statistical models and inference and for his graduate-level books. Early life David Victor Hinkley was born on 10 September 1944 in Kent, E ...

Peter McCullagh Peter McCullagh (born 8 January 1952) is a Northern Irish-born American statistician and John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. Education McCullagh is from Plumbridg ...

, Basilio de Bragança Pereira, Wally Smith, Gauss Moutinho Cordeiro,

Valerie Isham Valerie Susan Isham (born 1947) is a British applied probabilist and former President of the Royal Statistical Society. Isham's research interests in include point processes, spatial processes, spatio-temporal processes and population processe ...

Henry Wynn Henry Philip Wynn (born 19 February 1945) is a British statistician who has been a President of the Royal Statistical Society. He gained a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from Oxford and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Imperial Colle ...

and Jane Hutton. He served as President of the

Bernoulli Society The Bernoulli Society is a professional association which aims to further the progress of probability and mathematical statistics, founded as part of the International Statistical Institute in 1975. It is named after the Bernoulli family of mathem ...

from 1979 to 1981, of the

Royal Statistical Society The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) is an established statistical society. It has three main roles: a British learned society for statistics, a professional body for statisticians and a charity which promotes statistics for the public good. ...

from 1980 to 1982, and of the

International Statistical Institute The International Statistical Institute (ISI) is a professional association of statisticians. It was founded in 1885, although there had been international statistical congresses since 1853. The institute has about 4,000 elected members from gov ...

from 1995 to 1997. He was an Honorary Fellow of

and

, and was a member of the Department of Statistics at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

Personal life

In 1947, Cox married Joyce Drummond, and they had four children. He died on 18 January 2022, at the age of 97.

Research

Cox made pioneering and important contributions to numerous areas of statistics and applied probability, of which the best known are: *

Logistic regression In statistics, the logistic model (or logit model) is a statistical model that models the probability of an event taking place by having the log-odds for the event be a linear combination of one or more independent variables. In regression an ...

, which is employed when the variable to be predicted is categorical (i.e., can take a limited number of values, e.g., gender, race (in the US census)), binary (a special case of categorical with only two values - e.g., success/failure, disease/no disease), or ordinal, where the categories can be ranked (e.g., pain intensity can be absent, mild, moderate, severe, unbearable). Cox's 1958 paper and further publications in the 1960s addressed the case of binary logistic regression. * The

, which is widely used in the analysis of survival data, was developed by him in 1972. An example of the use of the proportional hazards model is in survival analysis in medical research. The model can be used in clinical trials to investigate time-based information about cohorts of patients, such as their response to exposure to certain chemical substances. * The Cox process was named after him.

Awards

Cox received numerous awards and honours for his work. He was awarded the

Guy Medal The Guy Medals are awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in three categories; Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Silver and Bronze medals are awarded annually. The Gold Medal was awarded every three years between 1987 and 2011, but is awarded biennia ...

s in Silver (1961) and Gold (1973) of the

. He was elected Fellow of the

Royal Society of London The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, r ...

in 1973. The next year, he was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

. He was

knighted A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a head of state (including the Pope) or representative for service to the monarch, the church or the country, especially in a military capacity. Knighthood finds origins in the G ...

Queen Elizabeth II Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; 21 April 1926 – 8 September 2022) was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until her death in 2022. She was queen regnant of 32 sovereign states during ...

in 1985. He was elected to the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

in 1990. Cox became an Honorary Fellow of the

British Academy The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars s ...

in 1997 and was a Fellow of the

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...

. He was a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the

Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters {{Infobox organization , name = The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters , full_name = , native_name = Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab , native_name_lang = , logo = Royal ...

. In 1990, he won the Kettering Prize and Gold Medal for Cancer Research for "the development of the Proportional Hazard Regression Model." In 2010 he was awarded the

Copley Medal The Copley Medal is an award given by the Royal Society, for "outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science". It alternates between the physical sciences or mathematics and the biological sciences. Given every year, the medal is t ...

of the Royal Society "for his seminal contributions to the theory and applications of statistics", the same year in which he was elected a foreign fellow of the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; french: Société royale du Canada, SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bil ...

. He was also the first ever recipient of the International Prize in Statistics. He received the award in 2016. In 2013 Cox was elected an Honorary Fellow of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...

. In 2016, he won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category jointly with

Bradley Efron Bradley Efron (; born May 24, 1938) is an American statistician. Efron has been president of the American Statistical Association (2004) and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1987–1988).Cochran, J. (1 September 2015), "ASA Lead ...

, for the development of "pioneering and hugely influential" statistical methods that have proved indispensable for obtaining reliable results in a vast spectrum of disciplines from medicine to astrophysics, genomics or particle physics.

Publications

Cox wrote or co-authored over 300 papers and books. From 1966 to 1991 he was the editor of ''

Biometrika ''Biometrika'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Oxford University Press for thBiometrika Trust The editor-in-chief is Paul Fearnhead ( Lancaster University). The principal focus of this journal is theoretical statistics. It was ...

''. His books are as follows: *''Planning of experiments'' (1958) *''Queues'' ( Methuen, 1961). With Walter L. Smith *''Renewal Theory'' ( Methuen, 1962). *''The theory of stochastic processes'' (1965). With Hilton David Miller *''Analysis of binary data'' (1969). With Joyce Snell *''Theoretical statistics'' (1974). With D. V. Hinkley *''Problems and Solutions in Theoretical Statistics'' (1978). With D. V. Hinkley *'' Point Processes'' (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1980). With

*''Applied statistics, principles and examples'' (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1981). With Joyce Snell *''Analysis of survival data'' (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1984). With David Oakes *''Asymptotic techniques for use in statistics''. (1989) With Ole E. Barndorff-Nielsen *''Inference and asymptotics'' (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1994). With Ole E. Barndorff-Nielsen *''Multivariate dependencies: models, analysis and interpretation'' (Chapman & Hall, 1995). With

Nanny Wermuth Nanny Wermuth (born 4 December 1943) is the Professor emerita of Statistics, Chalmers University of Technology/University of Gothenburg. Her research interests are Multivariate statistical models and their properties, especially graphical Markov ...

*''The theory of design of experiments''. (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2000). With Nancy M. Reid *''Complex stochastic systems'' (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2000). With Ole E. Barndorff-Nielsen and Claudia Klüppelberg *''Components of variance'' (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2003). With P. J. Solomon *''Principles of Statistical Inference'' (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Selected Statistical Papers of Sir David Cox 2 Volume SetPrinciples of Applied Statistics
(CUP). With Christl A. Donnelly He was named editor of the following books: * * * * The following book was published in his honour:
''Celebrating Statistics: Papers in honour of Sir David Cox on his 80th birthday''

References

External links

Sir David Cox
– homepage at web-site of

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

. * The certificate of election to the Royal Society is available a
Cox, David Roxbee
* There are two photographs a

* Cox's time in the Cambridge Statistical Laboratory is recounted i

* Summary of his life and work, page 3 o
ENBIS News, Winter/Spring 2006
* For Cox's PhD students see page. {{DEFAULTSORT:Cox, David 1924 births 2022 deaths 20th-century British mathematicians Academics of Birkbeck, University of London Academics of Imperial College London Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Leeds Elected Members of the International Statistical Institute English mathematicians English statisticians Fellows of Nuffield College, Oxford Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge Fellows of the American Statistical Association Fellows of the Royal Society Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences Honorary Fellows of the British Academy Knights Bachelor Members of Academia Europaea People educated at Handsworth Grammar School People from Birmingham, West Midlands Presidents of the International Statistical Institute Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society Queueing theorists Recipients of the Copley Medal Wardens of Nuffield College, Oxford Members of the American Philosophical Society

Early life

Career

Personal life

Research

Awards

Publications

See also

References

External links