I got my degrees in the 1950s from University College London, where I was inspired by F. N. David, N. L. Johnson, and E. S. Pearson. After two years in the British Army, I became a Lecturer at UCL, and spent a year at Princeton with George Box and Stu Hunter. In the 60s I worked with Herb Robbins at Columbia, and with Cuthbert Daniel. For 47 years (and counting) I have had the stimulation of Bell Labs and its descendants, collaborating with people like John Tukey, John Chambers, Martin Wilk, Ram Gnanadesikan, Jon Kettenring, Bill Cleveland, Trevor Hastie, Vijay Nair, Yehuda Vardi, Sid Dalal, Daryl Pregibon, and a steady stream of distinguished visitors. Not to mention many world-class mathematicians such as John Riordan, Steve Rice, Ron Graham, Larry Shepp, and Neil Sloane. I delivered the 1997 Fisher lecture on "The Zeroth Problem", and the 2004 Deming lecture.

I am best-known for inventing the Cp statistic. I have published papers on the theory of assurance, covering designs, stable variables, ranking methods, robustness, smoothing, and stopping rules. I am proudest of a joint paper on Exchangeability and Data Analysis. For the last three years before retiring from AT&T in 2000 I worked on the problem of determining whether Telcos are delivering "parity" service. I have also published several papers on more mathematical topics, including Chebychev inequalities, coding theory, a sequence problem of John Conway, and a generalization of Descartes' circles theorem.