Highlights from Recent George Box Speech

Posted on November 16, 2009 by John Hunter

The JMP blog has posted some highlights from George Box’s presentation at Discovery 2009 [the broken link was removed]

Infusing his entire presentation with humor and fascinating tales of his memories, Box focused on sequential design of experiments. He attributed much of what he knows about DOE [design of experiments] to Ronald A. Fisher. Box explained that Fisher couldn’t find the things he was looking for in his data, “and he was right. Even if he had had the fastest available computer, he’d still be right,” said Box. Therefore, Fisher figured out how to study a number of factors at one time. And so, the beginnings of DOE.

Having worked and studied with many other famous statisticians and analytic thinkers, Box did not hesitate to share his characterizations of them. He told a story about Dr. Bill Hunter and how he required his students to run an experiment. Apparently a variety of subjects was studied [see 101 Ways to Design an Experiment, or Some Ideas About Teaching Design of Experiments]
…
According to Box, the difficulty of getting DOE to take root lies in the fact that these mathematicians “can’t really get the fact that it’s not about proving a theorem, it’s about being curious about things. There aren’t enough people who will apply [DOE] as a way of finding things out. But maybe with JMP, things will change that way.”

George Box is a great mind and great person who I have had the privilege of knowing my whole life. My father took his class at Princeton, then followed George to the University of Wisconsin-Madison (where Dr. Box founded the statistics department and Dad received the first PhD). They worked together building the UW statistics department, writing Statistics for Experimenters and founding the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement among many other things.

Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation, and Discovery shows that the goal of design of experiments is to learn and refine your experiment based on the knowledge you gain and experiment again. It is a process of discovery. If done properly it is very similar to the PDSA cycle with the application of statistical tools to aid in determining the impact of various factors under study.

Related: Box on Quality – George Box Quotations – posts on design of experiments – Using Design of Experiments

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6 Responses to Highlights from Recent George Box Speech

  1. Bruce Baker says:
    November 16, 2009 at 10:57 pm

    Statistics for Experimenters is a great book. I keep that and Montgomery’s Design and Analysis of Experiments as my two doe refs. When I used to teach Six Sigma and we would get to CCDs I would tell my students that the only two important technical breakthroughs of 1957 were Chevrolet’s achievement of 1 hp per ci in the fuel injected 283 and the Box Hunter Central Composite Design. Did Behnken and Cox work at UW too?

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