George E. P. Box (1919-2013)

George Box was born in Gravesend near London, England, where his father worked at a tailor shop and barely earned enough to support the family. As a young man, he studied chemistry until World War II began and he was drafted. Because of his studies, he was sent to work in the chemical defense experiment station where he researched antidotes for poison gases. He noticed that when he tested antidotes on a small spot on people's arms, there was a correlation between the response in the two arms of the same person. To be able to study responses more effectively, he used Fisher's book on the design of experiments to carry out and analyze appropriate experiments.

After the war, he continued learning about statistics, studying at London University, and then began to work at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). At the invitation of Gertrude Cox (1900-1978), he came to the United States on a one-year leave from ICI. He returned to the United States in 1956 to take over the Statistical Techniques Research Group at Princeton. He later created the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

While at ICI he worked with people from the statistical group at University College where he met David Cox. Their names went so well together that they determined to someday write a joint paper. They eventually did and published it in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (1964) about what are now known as Box-Cox transformations. These allow a researcher to transform skewed data into an approximately normal distribution so that assumptions for tests are met. In addition, Box came up with the definition of robust meaning that a statistical test yields the correct results even when assumptions are not met, and he used this definition to test the robustness of existing statistical tests. Before his time, it was common practice to throw out data that appeared wrong or that did not meet assumptions, so his work allowed statistical inference to be performed, even on less-than-ideal data.

He wrote an autobiography titled An Accidental Statistician: The Life and Memories of George E. P. Box which was published in the year he passed away. After reading only a few pages, one can start to imagine his personality and the way he viewed the world. He wrote, Good science is a form of wit, of seeing the joke that nature is playing on us (Box, 2013, preface).