Ronald Fisher
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."
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2 Fisher information 3 Brief biography 4 Bibliography 5 External links |
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-squaredd 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).
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.
Contributions to statistics
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
Bibliography
A selection from Fisher's 395 articles
(The following are all available on the University of Adelaide website)
Books by Fisher
(Full publication details are available on the University of Adelaide website)
Biographies of Fisher
External links
| Topics in population genetics |
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| Key concepts: Hardy-Weinberg law | Fisher's fundamental theorem | neutral theory |
| Selection: natural | sexual | artificial | ecological |
| Genetic drift: small population size | population bottleneck | founder effect |
| Founders: Ronald Fisher | J.B.S. Haldane | Sewall Wright |
| Related topics: evolution | microevolution | evolutionary game theory | fitness landscape |
| List of evolutionary biology topics |