An Accidental Statistician: The Life and Memories of George E. P. Box

“There goes Bill!”

Chapter Twelve

Bill Hunter and Some Ideas on Experimental Design

Bill Hunter arrived in Madison to begin his Ph.D. in the fall of 1960 after working during the summer in Whiting, Indiana. He had enjoyed the job so much that he had written asking whether it was possible to start classes a week after the semester began. I wrote back telling him that no, this would not be possible, so Bill arrived just before classes started (Figure 12.1).

Figure 12.1 Stu Hunter, me, and Bill Hunter.

Bill was on a fast track from the day he came to Madison. He completed a brilliant thesis¹ in 1963. Soon after, we offered him an assistant professorship in the Statistics Department. From the beginning, he was an excellent teacher and did some first-class research. As a result, he became an associate professor in 1966, and a full professor in 1969, meaning that he had gone from graduate student to full professor in eight years.

During the first several years I worked at ICI, I taught statistics two nights a week at Salford Technical College to earn a bit of extra income. The college was about halfway between ICI, at Blackley, and my home in Sale, so I would work a full day at ICI, eat dinner at a greasy spoon restaurant, and go directly to the college to teach the class. The course concerned the design of experiments. I wrote out my notes, dittoed them, and circulated them to the class ...