… was a British statistician, who worked in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference. Born in Gravesend, Kent. Got a PhD under supervision by Egon Pearson. Married Joan Fisher, whose father was R. A. Fisher.

He began to study chemistry, but was called up for service before finishing. During World War II, he performed experiments for the British Army exposing small animals to poison gas. To analyze the results of his experiments, he taught himself statistics from available texts.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful".

• Box-Jenkins models
• Box-Cox transformation
• Box-Behnken design
• etc.

• "Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord [Eddington]. The theory is correct."
• "My greatest blunder" - regarding the cosmological constant, which later turned out to be true
• www.greaterwrong.com/posts/mpaqTWGiLT7GA3w76/einstein-s-speed
  • Einstein did a case of armchair reasoning that won, but we should not forget all the historical cases when it lost. It's hard and there's a reason science doesn't trust you to do it.

An early figure in rhetoric, famous for the story where he learned to speak well by filling his mouth with stones and trying to speak past them.

Founded a philosophical system identifying pleasure as the supreme good and viewing the world as a random conglomeration of atoms, not ruled by any larger providence.

Epicureanism was one of two dominant philosophies during the late Roman Empire, alongside Stoicism, which was more popular. One difference was that most of the system was thought up by Epicurus himself, whereas Stoicism has had many authors contributing to its evolution.