Sir David Roxbee Cox FRS FBA FRSE FRSC (15 July 1924 – 18 January 2022) was a British statistician and educator.

The first recipient of the International Prize in Statistics, he also received the Guy, George Box and Copley medals, as well as a knighthood.

[3][5] He received a Master of Arts in mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge,[1][3][6] and obtained his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1949, advised by Henry Daniels and Bernard Welch.

[7] Cox was employed from 1944 to 1946 at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, from 1946 to 1950 at the Wool Industries Research Association in Leeds,[8] and from 1950 to 1955 worked at the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.

[10][11] He was the doctoral advisor of David Hinkley, Peter McCullagh, Basilio de Bragança Pereira, Wally Smith, Gauss Moutinho Cordeiro, Valerie Isham, Henry Wynn, Claudio Di Veroli and Jane Hutton.

[6][24] In 1990, he won the Kettering Prize and Gold Medal for Cancer Research for "the development of the Proportional Hazard Regression Model."

[33] In 2016, he won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category jointly with Bradley Efron, for the development of "pioneering and hugely influential" statistical methods that have proved indispensable for obtaining reliable results in a vast spectrum of disciplines from medicine to astrophysics, genomics or particle physics.