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Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS (February 17, 1890 - July 29, 1962) was an extraordinarily talented evolutionary biologist, geneticist and
statistician. He has been described by Richard Dawkins as "The greatest of Darwin’s successors," and the historian of statistics Anders Hald said "Fisher was a genius who
almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science."
Contributions to statistics
Fisher invented the techniques of maximum likelihood and
analysis of variance, was a pioneer in the design of experiments, and originated the concepts of sufficiency, ancillarity, and Fisher information,
making him a major figure in 20th century statistics. His article "On a
distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics" presented Karl Pearson's chi-squared
and Student's t in the same framework as the normal distribution and his own analysis of variance
distribution z. Fisher's book Statistical methods for research workers showed how to use these distributions. His work
on the theory of population genetics also made him one of the
three great figures of that field, together with Sewall Wright and
J. B. S. Haldane, and as such one of the founders of the
neodarwinian modern synthesis. See also Fisher's linear discriminator.
Fisher's important contributions to both genetics and statistics are emphasized by the remark of L.J. Savage, “I
occasionally meet geneticists who ask me whether it is true that the great geneticist R.A. Fisher was also an important
statistician” (Annals of Statistics, 1976).
Fisher information
He introduced the concept of Fisher information in 1925, many years before Shannon's notion of entropy.
Fisher information has been the subject of renewed interest in the last few years, both due to the growth of Bayesian inference in AI, and due to
B. R. Frieden's book
Physics from Fisher Information, which attempts to derive the laws of physics from a Fisherian starting point.
Brief biography
He was born in East Finchley, London and obtained a B.A. degree in mathematics, not astronomy
as is often said, from Cambridge University in 1912. In 1911 he was involved in the formation of the
Cambridge University Eugenics Society. His studies of errors in astronomical calculations, together with his interests in
genetics and natural
selection, led to involvement in statistics.
From 1919 he worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station making contributions in statistics and genetics. In 1933 he became a professor of eugenics at University College London moving in 1943 to the Balfour chair of genetics at Cambridge.
He received various awards for his work and was made a Knight
Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth
II in 1952. He had a long running feud with Karl Pearson (he declined a post at the University of London), and later with Pearson's son E.S. Pearson.
After retiring from Cambridge he spent some time as a research fellow at the CSIRO in
Adelaide, Australia where he died
in 1962.
Bibliography
A selection from Fisher's 395 articles
(The following are all available on the University of Adelaide website)
- "Frequency distribution of the values of the correlation coefficient in samples from an indefinitely large population."
Biometrika, 10: 507-521.(1915)
- "The correlation between relatives on the
supposition of Mendelian inheritance" Trans. Roy. Soc. Edinb., 52: 399-433.(1918)
- "On the mathematical foundations of theoretical statistics" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A,
222: 309-368.(1922)
- "On the dominance ratio. Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinb., 42: 321-341.(1922)
- "On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics" Proc. Int. Cong. Math., Toronto,
2: 805-813. (1924)
- "Theory of statistical estimation" Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 22: 700-725
(1925)
- "Applications of Student's distribution" Metron, 5: 90-104 (1925)
- "The arrangement of field experiments" J. Min. Agric. G. Br., 33: 503-513.(1926)
- "The general sampling distribution of the multiple correlation coefficient" Proceedings of Royal Society, A,
121: 654-673 (1928)
- "Two new properties of mathematical likelihood" Proceedings of Royal Society, A, 144:
285-307(1934)
Books by Fisher
(Full publication details are available on the University of Adelaide website)
- Statistical methods for research workers (1925)
- The Genetical
Theory of Natural Selection (1930)
- The design of experiments (1935)
- Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research (1938,
coauthor:Frank Yates)
- The theory of inbreeding (1949)
- Contributions to mathematical statistics (1950)
- Statistical methods and statistical inference (1956)
Biographies of Fisher
External links
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