“All models are wrong; some models are useful.”

For instance in George E. P. Box, William Hunter and Stuart Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters, second edition, 2005, page 440. See "All models are wrong".

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Dec. 7, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "All models are wrong; some models are useful." by George E. P. Box?
George E. P. Box photo
George E. P. Box 14
British statistician 1919–2013

Related quotes

George E. P. Box photo

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Source: Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987), p. 424,

Martin Fowler photo

“Modeling Principle: Models are not right or wrong; they are more or less useful.”

Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer

Source: Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models, 1997, p. 2

George E. P. Box photo

“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Source: Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987), p. 74

Michael Lewis photo
Edward Fredkin photo

“Cellular automata are now being used to model varied physical phenomena normally modelled by wave equations, fluid dynamics, Ising models, etc. We hypothesize that there will be found a single cellular automaton rule that models all of microscopic physics; and models it exactly. We call this field DM, for digital mechanics.”

Edward Fredkin (1934) American physicist and computer scientist, a pioneer of digital physics

[An informational process based on reversible universal cellular automata, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 45, 1–3, September 1990, 254–270, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016727899090186S, 10.1016/0167-2789(90)90186-S]

Martin Fowler photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo
Orrin H. Pilkey photo
Lars Peter Hansen photo

Related topics