UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #717
BOX, GEORGE E. P.

BOX, George E. P. (1919-2013)
Professor, Statistics and Industrial Engineering; Director of Research, Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement
At UW: 1960-

Interviewed: 2005	
Interviewer: Robert Lange
Length: 4 hours, 50 minutes

Family history; Elementary and grammar school; Work and study in chemistry; Politics; Army service; Chemical Defense Experiment Station; Poison gas; Imperial Chemical Industries; Visiting Research Professor at the University of North Carolina; Statistical Techniques Research Group at Princeton University; Teaching; Chairmanship of statistics department; Consulting; Statistics for Experimenters; Time series research; Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement (CQPI); Math Research Center; Statistics faculty; Fellow of the Royal Society; Bayes’ Theorem. 

First Interview Session (August 2, 2005): Tapes 1-2

Tape 1/Side 1

00:00:28	George Box relates growing up in Gravesend, England.  He talks about his family's history, including his uncles' professions.

00:06:20	GB's grandfather went bankrupt in the 1890s, precluding his father from receiving further education.

00:08:02	GB was born in 1919 into a poor family.  Despite living 'hand-to-mouth' he recalls that he and his family were happy.

00:11:19	He attended a church school from age 5 to 10.  GB's poems gained the attention of the headmaster, who helped him earn a scholarship to grammar school.

00:14:44	He talks about his grammar school experience and its interruption by medical problems with his eyes.

00:16:47	GB was not regarded as university material, so at the age of 15-16 he obtained a job.  He had become interested in chemistry while studying in the labs at grammar school.

00:18:37	He achieved distinction on his chemistry and mathematics examinations.

00:20:43	GB found work as an assistant to a chemist at a water treatment plant in Gravesend.  He arranged to attend a technical college once a week in Gillingham.

00:22:34	He passed the external intermediate examination and went on to pursue a bachelor's degree in chemistry.  He enjoyed his work in the water treatment facility and even wrote a paper for a journal when he was 18 years old.

00:25:01	GB recalls his dissatisfaction with the appeasement policies of Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain.

00:26:04	He identified with the Labour Party but supported Winston Churchill, who was then a rebel in the Conservative Party.  GB was highly engaged in politics and read the New Statesman.

00:28:41	He recalls the events leading up to the Second World War.  After the invasion of Poland he prayed that Britain would go to war.  He immediately volunteered for the army, where he was placed in an engineering group.

00:30:08	GB developed expertise on how to blow up bridges, but before being deployed his chemical skills landed him at the Chemical Defense Experiment Station in southern England.  

00:32:20	He describes his work at the Chemical Defense Experiment Station; his research focused on how to respond to chemical weapons attacks.  GB had insisted that statistical methods would be necessary to design his experiments.

00:36:48	The Army Education Corps sent GB a reading list in statistics; he would read at night in order to find out what methods to use the following day in experimentation.  

00:40:03	Near the end of the war British troops discovered a German experiment station which housed machinery for producing poison gas.

00:41:38	GB digresses to relate an experiment on lewisite that he conducted with an American researcher. 

Tape 1/Side 2

00:47:09	George Box resumes his discussion of the discovery of poison gas in a German lab.  A sample was brought back to England for testing at the Chemical Defense Experiment Station.  The poison was exceedingly more potent than anything the British had discovered.

00:50:58	GB and the staff from the Experiment Station traveled to the station in Munsterlager, Germany.

00:54:39	The captive German scientists cooperated with the allied group.  

00:56:29	GB recalls consulting Professor R.A. Fisher at Cambridge on a particular research problem.

01:02:13	After the Second World War, GB applied to study statistics at University College, London.  He received his bachelor's degree in statistics with first class honors.

01:05:22	He opted to work for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), which offered to pay GB to pursue further study.

01:07:42	He talks about his work for ICI and describes his experiment designs.

01:15:27	GB submitted his work on experimental design to the Royal Statistical Society; the paper he co-authored with K. B. Wilson was published by the Society in 1951.

01:19:11	J.S. Hunter, a graduate student in statistics, read GB's paper and encouraged Gertrude Cox to invite GB to come to the University of North Carolina as a visiting professor.  GB obtained leave from ICI to go to North Carolina and supervise J.S. Hunter's research.

01:23:20	He had never before considered an academic career.

01:25:09	ICI had formed a statistical methods panel, of which GB was a member.  The panel published a book entitled Design and Analysis of Industrial Experiments.

01:28:52	He talks about his experience in North Carolina.

Tape 2/Side 1

01:34:07	George Box continues to talk about his time in North Carolina.

01:36:05	He discusses his relationship with graduate students at North Carolina and relates an anecdote about his piano playing.

01:40:43	GB contrasts the styles of American and British academic seminars and politics.

01:44:35	He and his students published a paper.

01:45:05	GB returned to England and worked for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in Manchester.

01:46:02	A professor at Princeton University recruited him to lead the Statistical Techniques Research Group as a senior research associate.

01:48:20	The US Army funded this research group.

01:49:28	GB decided to leave because he found the mathematics department too theoretical and not sufficiently applied as he would have liked.

01:50:44	Rudolph Langer of the Math Research Center at UW had come to the research group and recruited GB.

01:52:23	GB wanted to pursue research in chemical engineering and automatic optimization, but Princeton and Berkeley did not offer sufficient opportunities for him to do so.  UW-Madison, on the other hand, had a much more conducive environment for his statistical interests.

01:55:44	He was immediately made full professor.

01:56:21	When GB arrived at UW, mathematics professors grudgingly taught statistics courses and were willing to give up responsibility for teaching them.

01:56:01	He took over the advanced statistics course despite having no teaching experience.

01:59:18	GB describes his gradual conversion to Bayesian statistics.

02:00:28	He relates giving an informal graduate course at Princeton about the application of statistics to chemical engineering.  He talks about an undergraduate student, Bill Hunter, who took his course and followed GB to Madison.

02:03:27	GB discusses his statistics course and students at UW-Madison.

02:04:45	He begins to address faculty recruits, but briefly discusses his conception of statistics as a branch of science. In the United States, the tendency is to put statistics within theoretically-oriented mathematics departments.

02:07:27	GB describes his faculty recruits.

02:09:14	University administrators supported GB.

02:12:05	The new statistics department was originally housed in a Quonset hut before moving to a building on the corner of Lake Street and University Avenue.

02:13:58	GB had to establish the regulations for the MS and PhD programs in statistics.

02:15:55	He describes his attempts to find a new building for the statistics department in the mid-1960s.

02:19:50	GB served as chair of the department for the first seven years.

Tape 2/Side 2

02:21:06	George Box continues to discuss his chairmanship of the statistics department.

02:22:08	He talks about his consulting for industries; this often included teaching short courses through UW-Extension.  He describes the teaching style for these courses.

02:25:25	GB discusses frustrating approaches to teaching mathematics that emphasize theory, rather than concrete examples or application. 

02:27:55	GB discusses his belief in ‘learning by doing.’

02:32:47	He relates the genesis and composition of his widely-read book.  He drew upon his notes from work and study in England and at Princeton as well as upon his interest in geometry.

02:38:26	Statistics for Experimenters was first published in 1978.  GB thinks it has become a classic.

02:40:25	End of First Interview Session. 

Second Interview Session (August 3, 2005): Tapes 2-4

Tape 2/Side 2, continued
00:00:12	George Box set up Monday night sessions in order to prevent schisms in the statistics department.  These sessions assisted researchers in designing experiments.

00:04:14	He instituted annual Christmas parties.

00:05:57	He talks again about Monday night sessions, which were run for about thirty years.

00:10:49	The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded a new building for the statistics department.  GB talks about designs for the new building.

00:16:29	He discusses time series research and a book he wrote with Gwilym Jenkins, Time Series Analysis.  This research and the resultant Box-Jenkins method was applicable to economics and banking. Box speaks broadly about the benefits of collaborative work. 

Tape 3/Side 1

00:27:33	George Box discusses his research and the writing of Statistical Control by Monitoring and Feedback Adjustment with Alberto Luceño at the University of Cantabria in Spain.

00:30:03	Box speaks about his various travels to Spain. His book Statistics for Experimenters was published in a Spanish edition.

00:35:08	GB discusses the genesis of the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement (CQPI). He describes why and how American automakers became interested in the role of statistics within the context of Japanese car manufacturing. 

00:42:30	He went to Japan as part of an NSF delegation of statisticians to investigate methods used there in the automobile industry.

00:47:51	GB and William Hunter intended the CQPI to have joint affiliations with the College of Engineering, the College of Letters & Science, and the Business School.  

00:51:00	Hunter asked Mayor Joseph Sensenbrenner if the CQPI could help improve city services such as motor vehicle repair for public vehicles.  GB describes the CQPI’s work for the city.

Tape 3/Side 2

00:59:05	George Box describes the short courses run by the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement (CQPI).  

01:01:11	GB directed the CQPI after William Hunter died.  After GB retired, it was difficult to find a new director.  As a result the department of industrial engineering has taken over the CQPI and has reoriented the center toward health issues.

01:03:55	He talks about visiting a Toyota plant in Japan.

01:06:12	GB thinks Japanese industry adopted new statistical methods because they were desperate to get ahead.  In the United States, by contrast, industrial arrogance precluded the modernization of methods.

01:09:59	He talks about the adoption of Six Sigma method by American industries.

01:14:08	GB recalls his work at the Math Research Center at UW.  

01:16:38	He gave several courses on time series for the army but found that his students were typically not interested in the subject matter.

01:18:51	Student activists had inaccurate ideas about the work conducted at the Math Research Center.  GB tried to reason with some of the protesters but failed to convince them.

01:20:55	After the Second World War, the US Navy, Army, and Air Force established their own research offices to fund research.  The book GB co-authored with Gwilym Jenkins had been funded by the Air Force.

01:23:50	He discusses the relationship between the departments of statistics and computer science and the failure of his hope to establish strong ties between the two.

01:28:27	GB describes faculty he recruited to the statistics department.

Tape 4/Side 1

01:29:59	George Box continues to describe early faculty recruited to the statistics department.

01:31:39	He talks about Norman Draper and their collaboration on research.

01:34:27	He resumes his description of numerous statistics faculty, including Soren Bisgaard, Brian Joiner, Sam Wu, and Jeff Wu. He talks about the cleavage in the statistics department between those who advocated applied statistics and those who wanted to push the department in a more theoretical direction.

01:41:09	GB reflects upon his work in establishing the statistics department and the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement.

01:43:16	He remarks upon his election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society.

01:52:06	He relates meeting the Queen of England at a Royal Statistical Society event.

01:57:33	GB describes Madison Police Chief Cooper’s interest in quality improvement.

02:01:27	He reads some verse he wrote about Bayes’ Theorem.

02:10:32	End of side.  End of tape.  End of interview.

END