Joseph Michael Hilbe (December 30, 1944 – March 12, 2017) was an American statistician and philosopher, founding President of the International Astrostatistics Association(IAA) and one of the most prolific authors of books on statistical modeling in the early twenty-first century. Hilbe was an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), for which he founded the ISI astrostatistics committee in 2009. Hilbe was also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and Full Member of the American Astronomical Society. Hilbe made a number of contributions to the fields of count response models and logistic regression. Among his most influential books are two editions of Negative Binomial Regression (Cambridge University Press, 2007, 2011), Modeling Count Data (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Logistic Regression Models (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2009). Modeling Count Data won the 2015 PROSE honorable mention award for books in mathematics as the second best mathematics book published in 2014. Hilbe was also editor-in-chief of the Springer Series in Astrostatistics, which began in 2011, was one of two co-editors for the Astrostatistics and AstroInformatics Portal, a co-ordinated website for the major astrostatistical organizations worldwide, hosted by the Pennsylvania State University Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and was coordinating editor of the Cambridge University Press Series on Predictive Analytics in Action, which commenced in 2012. A listing of his books, book chapters and encyclopedia articles are listed below (Publications). Hilbe was also a two-time national champion track & field athlete, a US team and NCAA Division 1 head coach, and Olympic Games official. He was also chair of the ISI sports statistics committee from 2007 to 2011 and chair of the 2014 Section on Statistics and Sports of the American Statistical Association. Life and works Born in Los Angeles, California, son of Rader John Hilbe (1910–1980) and Nadyne Anderson Hilbe (1910–1988), Hilbe was raised in Arcadia, California, attended three years of high school at Woodside Priory School in Portola Valley, California, before graduating from Paradise, California high school in 1962. Hilbe attended California State University, Chico, from which he graduated in 1968 with a degree in philosophy. Hilbe studied for his doctorate in philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he was a graduate reader for visiting professor and Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek and personal assistant to Rudolf Carnap, one of the founders of the Vienna Circle