British Statistician Won Global Acclaim for His Methods By James R. Hagerty, Jan. 28, 2022
Dr. Cox said he came up with one of the crucial ideas for his 1972 paper while in bed with the flu and a high temperature. As for the success of that paper, he described it as ?somewhat of a fluke, an issue of timing, that it happens to get so much attention.?
In his mid-90s, Dr. Cox was still frequently quoted and engaged in statistical research. He was skeptical of the more extravagant claims made for big data. ?The notion that you have a lot of data?so what?? he said in a recent video discussion led by Robert Tibshirani, a professor of statistics at Stanford University. ?You?ve got to have some intelligent questions to ask about, have some purpose to it.?
In another interview, he said: ?My intrinsic feeling is that more fundamental progress is more likely to be made by very focused, relatively small-scale, intensive investigations than collecting millions of bits of information on millions of people, for example. It?s possible to collect such large data now, but it depends on the quality, which may be very high or not.?
David Roxbee Cox was born in Birmingham, England, on July 15, 1924. In the early 1940s, he studied mathematics at St. John?s College, Cambridge. During World War II, he was assigned to an aircraft-research agency in Farnborough, England, a posting that diverted him toward an unanticipated career in statistics.
?There was an enormous shortage of statisticians,? he said in a 1993 interview with Nancy Reid, a professor at the University of Toronto, ?and the notion was that anyone doing a mathematics degree and doing reasonably well knew something about statistics or could learn it very quickly?a totally false assumption.? He worked on studies of accident rates, the durability of materials used in making aircraft and estimates of how long spot welds would last.
After the war, he moved to the Wool Industries Research Assn. Among his responsibilities there was testing different types of carpeting for durability. One method was to place swaths of carpet in train stations where thousands of people would stampede over them each day.
After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Leeds in 1949, he taught and did research at the University of Cambridge, the University of North Carolina, Birkbeck, Imperial College London and Nuffield College in Oxford.
He married Joyce Drummond, and they had 4 kids, according to the 1993 interview.
Knighted in 1985, he was known formally as Sir David Cox. Colleagues praised his modesty and willingness to mentor younger researchers.
In 2016, Dr. Cox was named the first recipient of the International Prize in Statistics. The citation said his models had provided new insights into the effects of particulate air pollution on human health and the risk factors for ailments including cystic fibrosis, obesity and sleep apnea, among many other things.
He also won the Kettering Prize for work involving cancer treatment and was involved in early studies of HIV and AIDS.
One of his most demanding assignments, Dr. Cox said, was a study of bovine tuberculosis in badgers. ?It involved a great deal of work, which was very interesting and instructive in all sorts of ways, and not just in statistics.?
Dr. Cox didn?t want to be limited by his statistical expertise. In a 2014 interview, he said: ?I would like to think of myself as a scientist who happens largely to specialize in the use of statistics.?