David Cox (statistician)

Sir David Roxbee Cox (born 1924 in Birmingham, England) is an English statistician.

He studied mathematics at St. John's College of the University of Cambridge and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds in 1949, advised by Henry Daniels and Bernard Welch. 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. From 1966 to 1988 he was Professor of Statistics at Imperial College London. 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. Sir David 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 U.S. 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."

As of June 2005, Sir David Cox has written or co-authored 300 papers and books. From 1966 through 1991 he was the editor of Biometrika. 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.

Books

 * 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
 * Applied statistics, principles and examples (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1981). With Joyce E. Snell
 * Asymptotic techniques for use in statistics. With Ole E. Barndorff-Nielsen
 * Theoretical statistics (1974). With D. V. Hinkley
 * Point processes (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1980). With Valerie Isham
 * Analysis of survival data (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1984). With David Oakes
 * The collected works of John Tukey (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1992). Editor.
 * Inference and asymptotics (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1994). With Ole E. Barndorff-Nielsen
 * Time series models in econometrics, finance and others (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1996). With D. V. Hinkley and Ole E. Barndorff-Nielsen (editors)
 * 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 9780521685672

Selected papers and festschrift

 * Selected Statistical Papers of Sir David Cox 2 Volume Set
 * Celebrating Statistics: Papers in honour of Sir David Cox on his 80th birthday

External references

 * Sir David Cox - homepage at web-site of University of Oxford.

Cox, David Roxbee
 * The certificate of election to the Royal Society is available at

Portraits of Statisticians
 * There are two photographs at

The History of the Cambridge Statistical Laboratory
 * Cox's time in the Cambridge Statistical Laboratory is recounted in


 * Summary of his life and work, page 3 of ENBIS News, Winter/Spring 2006

David Roxbee Cox on the Mathematics Genealogy Project page.
 * For Cox's PhD students see

ডেভিড কক্স (পরিসংখ্যানবিদ) David Cox (Mathematiker) David Cox David Cox (tilastotieteilijä)