George Edward Pelham Box, born 18 October 1919 in Gravesend, Kent, England, was one of the most influential statisticians of the 20th century and a pioneer in the areas of quality control, time series analysis, design of experiments and Bayesian inference. Box was originally trained as a chemist, and he worked on biochemical experiments on the effect of poison gases on small animals for the British Army during World War II. He needed statistical advice to analyze the results of his experiments, but could not find a statistician who could give him guidance so he taught himself statistics from available texts. After the war, he enrolled at University College London and obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics. He received a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1953.
From 1948 to 1956, Box worked as a statistician for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). While at ICI, he took a leave of absence for a year and served as a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He later went to Princeton University where he served as Director of the Statistical Research Group.
In 1960, Box moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create the Department of Statistics. He served as President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1979, was appointed Vilas Research Professor of Statistics (the highest honor accorded to any faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) in 1980, and became Emeritus Professor in 1992 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Box was named a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1979 to honor his years of distinguished accomplishment in statistical theory and methods.
George Box and Bill Hunter co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984.
Throughout his career, George Box has written numerous research papers and published many books. One of his most important contributions to the field of experimental design was his book, Statistics for Experimenters. In time series analysis his most important contributions was the 1970 book Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control with Gwilym Jenkins. In Bayesian theory his most important contributions were in the 1973 book with George C. Tiao Bayesian Inference in Statistical Analysis. Today, his name is associated with important results in statistics such as Box-Jenkins models, Box-Cox transformations, Box-Behnken designs and numerous others.
Box married Joan Fisher, second of Ronald Fisher's five daughters. In 1978 Joan Fisher Box published a very well-received biography of her father, R. A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist Preface