George E. P. Box

George E. P. Box was a British statistician who spent much of his career at Imperial Chemical Industries before establishing the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1960 and later founding its Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement. Box made significant contributions across quality control, time series analysis, the design of experiments and Bayesian inference. With Gwilym Jenkins, Box developed the Box-Jenkins methodology, a widely used systematic approach to identifying, fitting and checking time series models for forecasting. With David Cox, Box developed the Box-Cox transformation, a family of power transformations used to make data more closely satisfy the assumptions of standard statistical methods, and he also contributed the Box-Behnken designs used in response surface methodology for experiments. Box is often remembered for his frequently quoted aphorism that all models are wrong but some are useful, a statement that has shaped how working statisticians think about the practical role of mathematical models.