David Cox (statistician)

David Cox
Born	15 July 1924 (1924-07-15) (age 87) Birmingham, England
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Fields	Statistics
Institutions	Royal Aircraft Establishment Wool Industries Research Association University of Cambridge Birkbeck College, London Imperial College, London Nuffield College, Oxford
Alma mater	St John's College, Cambridge University of Leeds
Doctoral advisor	Henry Daniels and Bernard Welch
Doctoral students	David Hinkley Peter McCullagh Basilio de Bragança Pereira Walter L. Smith Gauss Moutinho Cordeiro Valerie Isham
Known for	Cox proportional hazards model Stochastic processes Design of experiments Analysis of binary data
Notable awards	Knight Bachelor Fellow of the Royal Society Guy medals in silver and gold Kettering Prize Copley Medal

Sir David Roxbee Cox FRS (b.1924 Birmingham, England) is a prominent British statistician.

Biography

Early years

Cox studied mathematics at St. John's College, Cambridge and obtained his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1949, advised by Henry Daniels and Bernard Welch.^[1]

Career

He was employed from 1944 to 1946 at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, from 1946 to 1950 at the Wool Industries Research Association in Leeds, and from 1950 to 1956 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 Imperial College London where he later become head of the mathematics department. In 1988 he became Warden of Nuffield College and a member of the Department of Statistics at Oxford University. He formally retired from these positions in 1994.

Cox has received numerous honorary doctorates. He has been awarded the Guy Medals in Silver (1961) and Gold (1973) of the Royal Statistical Society. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1973, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1985 and became an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy in 2000. He is a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. 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 of the Royal Society "for his seminal contributions to the theory and applications of statistics." It is given for "outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science, and alternates between the physical sciences and the biological sciences". Awarded every year, the medal is the oldest Royal Society medal still being awarded, having first been given in 1731.

He has supervised, collaborated with, and encouraged many younger researchers now prominent in statistics. He has served as President of the Bernoulli Society, of the Royal Statistical Society, and of the International Statistical Institute. He is now an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College and a member of the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford.

He has made pioneering and important contributions to numerous areas of statistics and applied probability, of which the best known is perhaps the proportional hazards model, which is widely used in the analysis of survival data. An example is survival times in medical research that can be related to information about the patients such as age, diet or exposure to certain chemical substances. The Cox process was named after him.

Personal life

In 1947 he married Joyce Drummond and they have four children and two grandchildren.

Bibliography

Sir David Cox has written or co-authored 300 papers and books. From 1966 to 1991 he was the editor of Biometrika. His books are as follows:

• Planning of experiments (1958)
• Queues (Methuen, 1961). With Walter L. Smith
• The theory of stochastic processes (1965). With Hilton David Miller
• Analysis of binary data (1969). With Joyce E. Snell
• Theoretical statistics (1974). With D. V. Hinkley
• Point processes (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1980). With Valerie Isham
• Applied statistics, principles and examples (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1981). With Joyce E. 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
• Components of variance (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2003). With P. J. Solomon
• Principles of Statistical Inference (Cambridge University Press, 2006). ISBN 978-0-521-68567-2
• Selected Statistical Papers of Sir David Cox 2 Volume Set
• Principles of Applied Statistics (CUP) With Christl A. Donnelly

He is an named editor of the following books

• Time series models in econometrics, finance and others (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1996). With D. V. Hinkley and Ole E. Barndorff-Nielsen (editors)
• D. M. Titterington and D. R. Cox, ed (2001). Biometrika: One Hundred Years. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-850993-6. 
• The collected works of John Tukey (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1992). Editor.

The following book was published in his honour.

• Celebrating Statistics: Papers in honour of Sir David Cox on his 80th birthday ISBN 0-19-856654-9

See also

• Cox process
• Proportional hazards models
• Logrank test
• Box-Cox transformation

References

1. ^ entry at Mathematics Genealogy Project

• Portrait

External links

• Sir David Cox - homepage at web-site of University of Oxford.
• The certificate of election to the Royal Society is available at Cox, David Roxbee
• There are two photographs at Portraits of Statisticians
• Cox's time in the Cambridge Statistical Laboratory is recounted in The History of the Cambridge Statistical Laboratory
• Summary of his life and work, page 3 of ENBIS News, Winter/Spring 2006
• For Cox's PhD students see David Roxbee Cox on the Mathematics Genealogy Project page.
• Nancy Reid (August 1994). "A Conversation with Sir David Cox". Statistical Science 9 (3): 439–455. doi:10.1214/ss/1177010394. 

Academic offices
Preceded by Claus Moser	President of the Royal Statistical Society 1980–1982	Succeeded by Peter Armitage

Persondata
Name	Cox, David Roxbee
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	15 July 1924
Place of birth	Birmingham, England
Date of death
Place of death