David Roxbee Cox: Innovative statistician. He was born in Birmingham, UK, on July 15,1924 and died in Oxford, UK, on Jan 18,2022 aged 97 years.

摘要

He was an internationally acknowledged innovator in statistics, but being thought of as a professional statistician was not something that much appealed to Professor Sir David Cox. As he revealed in a 2014 interview, "I like to think of myself as a scientist who happens to specialise in statistics". Having occupied chairs in statistics in the UK at London's Birkbeck College from 1961 to 1966 and then at Imperial College London from 1966 to 1988, the description was not one that Cox could easily escape. His stance becomes less puzzling when you consider the breadth of his career, which started with tests of stress resilience in aircraft wings, progressed to the physical properties of wool, and burgeoned in the field of medicine where the statistical methods he devised were universally adopted. A clue to his outlook can be gleaned from comments by one of Cox's ex-students and subsequent collaborators, Ruth Keogh. "He was motivated by interesting problems", says Keogh, Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK. "The real problems that people had, and that he'd discussed with them." Cox loved problem solving.