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 language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

included introducing

logistic regression In statistics, a logistic model (or logit model) is a statistical model that models the logit, log-odds of an event as a linear function (calculus), linear combination of one or more independent variables. In regression analysis, logistic regres ...

, 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 haz ...

and the Cox process, a

point process In statistics and probability theory, a point process or point field is a set of a random number of mathematical points randomly located on a mathematical space such as the real line or Euclidean space. Kallenberg, O. (1986). ''Random Measures'', ...

named after him. He was a professor of statistics at Birkbeck College, London,

Imperial College London Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a Public university, public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a Al ...

and the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

, 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 ident ...

Nuffield College, Oxford Nuffield College () is one of the Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is a graduate college specialising in the social sciences, particularly economics, politics and sociology. N ...

. 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 gre ...

and Copley medals, as well as a

knighthood A knight is a person granted an honorary title of a 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. The concept of a knighthood ...

Early life

Cox was born in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands, within the wider West Midlands (region), West Midlands region, in England. It is the Lis ...

on 15 July 1924. His father was a die sinker and part-owner of a jewellery shop, and they lived near the

Jewellery Quarter The Jewellery Quarter is an area of central Birmingham, England, in the north-western area of Birmingham City Centre, with a population of 19,000 in a area. The Jewellery Quarter is Europe's largest concentration of businesses involved in the ...

. The aeronautical engineer Harold Roxbee Cox was a distant cousin. He attended Handsworth Grammar School, Birmingham. He received a

Master of Arts A Master of Arts ( or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA or AM) 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. Those admitted to the degree have ...

in mathematics at

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College, formally the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge, founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch L ...

, and obtained his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

from the

University of Leeds The University of Leeds is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was established in 1874 as the Yorkshire College of Science. In 1884, it merged with the Leeds School of Medicine (established 1831) and was renamed Y ...

in 1949, advised by Henry Daniels 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 Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom), UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), bef ...

, from 1946 to 1950 at the Wool Industries Research Association 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. 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 Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is a graduate college specialising in the social sciences, particularly economics, politics and sociology. N ...

and a member of the Department of Statistics at

Oxford University The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...

. 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 and they were especially delighted to be credited as Box and Cox. He was the doctoral advisor of David Hinkley, Peter McCullagh, Basilio de Bragança Pereira, Wally Smith, Gauss Moutinho Cordeiro, Valerie Isham, Henry Wynn, Claudio Di Veroli and Jane Hutton. He served as president of the

Bernoulli Society The Bernoulli Society is a professional association that 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 The Berno ...

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. At a meeting of the Jubilee Meeting of the Royal Statistical Society, statisticians met and formed the agreed statues of the International Statistical ...

from 1995 to 1997. He was an Honorary Fellow of

and

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

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, a logistic model (or logit model) is a statistical model that models the logit, log-odds of an event as a linear function (calculus), linear combination of one or more independent variables. In regression analysis, logistic regres ...

, 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 bienni ...

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 (The Academy) 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, and other ...

. He was

knighted A knight is a person granted an honorary title of a 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. The concept of a knighthood ...

Queen Elizabeth II Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; 21 April 19268 September 2022) was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until Death and state funeral of Elizabeth II, her death in 2022. ...

in 1985. He was elected to the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...

in 1990. Cox became an Honorary Fellow of the

British Academy The British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical and Philological Studies 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 sa ...

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 continuous ...

. 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 The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters ({{Langx, da, Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab or ''Videnskabernes Selskab'') is a Danish academy of science. The Royal Danish Academy was established on 13 November 1742, and was create ...

. In 1990, he won the

Kettering Prize The Charles F. Kettering Prize was a US$250,000 award given by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation for the most outstanding recent contribution to the diagnosis or treatment of cancer. __TOC__ History The award was named in honor of Ch ...

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 the most prestigious award of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, conferred "for sustained, outstanding achievements in any field of science". The award alternates between the physical sciences or mathematics and the bio ...

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; , 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, bilingual council of distinguishe ...

. 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 (RSE) 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 establis ...

. In 2016, he won the

BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards () are an international award programme recognizing significant contributions in the areas of scientific research and cultural creation. The categories that make up the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards ...

in the Basic Sciences category jointly with Bradley Efron, 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 the Biometrika 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 Valerie Isham *''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 *''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 Claudia Klüppelberg (born May 23, 1953) is a German mathematical statistician and applied probability theorist, known for her work in risk assessment and statistical finance. She is a professor emerita of mathematical statistics at the Technica ...

*''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 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

. * 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

* {{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 British mathematical statisticians Members of the National Academy of Medicine