George E. P. Box Quotations

George Edward Pelham Box (born 18 October 1919) is Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin, and a pioneer in the areas of quality control, time series analysis, design of experiments and Bayesian inference. He was the son-in-law of Sir Ronald Fisher.

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Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
- - - Variations:
      - Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.
        
        Box and Draper, Empirical Model-Building, p. 74
      - All models are false but some models are useful.