John David Fox (1947-2025)

John Fox passed away on November 26th, 2025. This was sad news, although not unexpected. John had retired from the R Foundation in March 2023, citing health issues. He had been an elected member since 2006.

With a background as a user of S-PLUS, for which his car software was originally written, John became a very early adopter of R and was active on the R mailing lists even before R 1.0.0 in 2000. He remained active in the following decades and was answering questions on R-help as late as mid-2025.

John authored several R packages, notably Rcmdr, sem, car, and ivreg, and also wrote several books.

The sem package was the first widely used implementation of structural equation models in R.

Rcmdr, documented in his 2017 book, has been widely used as an introduction to R, softening the learning curve by leading novice students from a point-and-click interface into using R scripts.

car and the “R Companion to Applied Regression” is full of insights about specifying and interpreting regression models.

“Applied Regression Analysis and Generalized Linear Models” is deliberately software-agnostic, but stands as a testament to his methodological insights and pedagogical skills.

John served on the Editorial Board of R News during its transition to the R Journal, changing it from newsletter status to a proper scientific journal. The convention at the time was that you served for three years and was Editor in Chief in the last year, 2006-2008 in John’s case, but he offered to stay on another year to help Vince Carey in the transition phase.

A sociologist by training, John took a particular interest in the social dynamics of the R project. He managed to secure interviews with several R Core members and use them in his 2009 R Journal paper. He later, with Allison Leanage, wrote about the interactions between R and the Journal of Statistical Software.

John was a good-natured and very friendly person, always a pleasure to be with on the occasions we had to meet in person. He did great service to the R community.

Peter Dalgaard on behalf of The R Foundation

References

Fox, J. (2005). The R Commander: A Basic-Statistics Graphical User Interface to R. Journal of Statistical Software, 14(9), 1–42. doi: 10.18637/jss.v014.i09

Fox, J. (2009). Aspects of the Social Organization and Trajectory of the R Project. The R Journal, 1(2), 5–13. doi:10.32614/rj-2009-014

Fox, J., & Leanage, A. (2016). R and the Journal of Statistical Software. Journal of Statistical Software, 73(2), 1–13. doi:10.18637/jss.v073.i02

Fox, J. (2016). Applied Regression Analysis and Generalized Linear Models (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.

Fox, J. (2017). Using the R Commander: A Point-and-Click Interface for R. Chapman and Hall/CRC.

Fox, J., & Weisberg, S. (2019). An R Companion to Applied Regression (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.

John’s Wikipedia entry