George E. P. Box

George Edward Pelham Box was a British statistician, born in Gravesend, Kent on 18 October 1919, who worked in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments and Bayesian inference. He has been called one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century, and his remark that all models are wrong but some are useful has been widely discussed. He taught himself statistics during World War II to analyze experiments exposing small animals to poison gas, then obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics at University College London and a PhD from the University of London in 1953 under Egon Pearson and H. O. Hartley. He worked as a statistician for Imperial Chemical Industries from 1948 to 1956, and in 1960 moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create the Department of Statistics. He died on 28 March 2013.