David Cox (1924-2022)

It is with much sadness that I heard from Oxford yesterday night that David Cox had passed away. Hither goes a giant of the field, whose contributions to theoretical and methodological statistics are enormous and whose impact on society is truly exceptional. He was the first recipient of the International Prize in Statistics in 2016 (aka the “Nobel of Statistics”) among many awards and a Fellow of the Royal Society among many other recognitions. He was also the editor of Biometrika for 25 years (!) and was still submitting papers to the journal a few month ago. Statistical Science published a conversation between Nancy Reid and him that tells a lot about the man and his amazing modesty. While I had met him in 1989, when he was visiting Cornell University as a distinguished visitor (and when I drove him to the house of Anne and George Casella for dinner once), then again in the 1990s when he came on a two-day visit to CREST,  we only really had a significant conversation in 2011 (!), when David and I attended the colloquium in honour of Mike Titterington in Glasgow and he proved to be most interested in the ABC algorithm. He published a connected paper in Biometrika the year after, with Christiana Katsonaki. We met a few more times later, always in Oxford, to again discuss ABC. In each occasion, he was incredibly kind and considerate.

the last digit of e

Éric Marchand from Sherbrooke, Québec [historical birthplace of MCMC, since Adrian Smith gave his first talk on his Gibbs sampler there, in June 1989], noticed my recent posts about the approximation of e by Monte Carlo methods and sent me a paper he wrote in The Mathematical Gazette of November 1995 [full MCMC era!] about original proofs on the expectation of some stopping rules being e, like the length of increasing runs. And Gnedenko’s uniform summation until exceeding one. Amazing that this simple problem generated so much investigation!!!