Resumen de Former Students Recall Gertrude Cox

Ingram Olkin, Marvin Kastenbaum, Mike Free, Stu Hunter

• 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. There is a very nice article by Helena Hoen (Gertrude was her grandmother’s sister), titled “The Life and Times of Gertrude Cox,” that appeared on April 3, 2013, and can be accessed at http://gmclife.blogspot.com.

  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 I knew during the period 1948–1954 to recall contacts with Gertrude.

  These are below, and we invite other recollections.