Cox, David

David Cox, in full Sir David Roxbee Cox, (born July 15, 1924, Birmingham, Warwickshire [now West Midlands], England—died January 18, 2022), British statistician best known for his proportional hazards model.

Cox studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and from 1944 to 1946 he worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. From 1946 to 1950 he worked at the Wool Industries Research Association of Science and Technology in Leeds, and in 1949 he received his doctorate in statistics from the University of Leeds. He was an assistant lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge from 1950 to 1955. In 1956 he became reader in statistics at Birkbeck College, London, and became a professor there in 1961. From 1966 to 1968 he was a professor of statistics at Imperial College in London. He became warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1988 and retired in 1994.

The statistical field of survival analysis is concerned with the interval of time that passes until a particular event, such as a mechanical failure or the death of a patient, takes place. The rate at which the failure happens or the patient dies is known as the hazard function. In the Cox proportional hazards model, which was introduced in 1972, Cox proposed a hazard function that was separated into time-dependent and time-independent parts. The analysis of medical data was greatly eased by the separation of inputs that depend on time from those that do not, and the Cox model is used extensively in medical research. In 1990 Cox was awarded the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation’s Kettering Prize, an honour for outstanding contributions to the treatment of cancer.

Cox was knighted in 1985. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1973 and received its Copley Medal in 2010. He wrote books on many aspects of statistics including The Theory of Stochastic Processes (with H.D. Miller, 1965), Theoretical Statistics (with D.V. Hinkley, 1974), Analysis of Survival Data (with David Oakes, 1984), and Principles of Statistical Inference (2006).