RSSeNEWS to be determined...

Sir David Cox has been awarded the Copley medal of the Royal Society. This medal, the Royal Society’s oldest award and generally regarded as its most prestigious, was given ‘for his seminal contributions to the theory and application of statistics’.

The medal is given annually for outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science. It was first awarded in 1731, and previous recipients have included Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Michael Faraday, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Ernest Rutherford and Ronald Fisher.

It is particularly pleasing that this award should go to Sir David in 2010, firstly because this is the 350th anniversary year of the Royal Society and such an award properly reflects the breadth of the discipline of statistics, and secondly because 2010 is the inaugural year of the United Nation’s World Statistics Day (20 October).