Former Students Recall Gertrude Cox

摘要

After attending a JSM panel titled "Educating Future Leaders in Statistics," one of the attendees commented to me that although there are formal biographies of Gertrude Cox in Wikipedia and in her obituaries, there are few anecdotal reflections of her as a person. Gertrude was a tour de force. She was the initiator of a department of experimental statistics at North Carolina State University and a department of mathematical statistics at Chapel Hill in 1946. Later, she created a department of biostatistics at Chapel Hill. I contacted several former students-Mike Free, Stu Hunter, and Marvin Kastenbaum-whom L knew during the period 1948-1954 to recall contacts with Gertrude. These are below, and we invite other recollections.