Ronald Fisher

For the New Zealand cricketer, see Ronald Fisher (cricketer).

Sir
Ronald Fisher
FRS
Fisher in 1913
Born
Ronald Aylmer Fisher

(1890-02-17)17 February 1890
London, England
Died29 July 1962(1962-07-29) (aged 72)
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Alma materGonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Known forFisher's exact test
Fisher's inequality
Fisher's principle
Fisher's geometric model
Fisher's Iris data set
Fisher's linear discriminant
Fisher's equation
Fisher information
Fisher's method
Fisherian runaway
Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection
Fisher's noncentral hypergeometric distribution
Fisher's z-distribution
Fisher transformation
Fisher consistency
F-distribution
F-test
Fisher–Tippett distribution
Fisher–Tippett–Gnedenko theorem
Fisher–Yates shuffle
Fisher–Race blood group system
Behrens–Fisher problem
Cornish–Fisher expansion
von Mises–Fisher distribution
family allowance
Wright–Fisher model
Ancillary statistic
Fiducial inference
Intraclass correlation
Infinitesimal model
Inverse probability
Lady tasting tea
Null hypothesis
Maximum likelihood estimation
Neutral theory of molecular evolution
Particulate inheritance
p-value
Random effects model
Relative species abundance
Reproductive value
Sexy son hypothesis
Sufficient statistic
Analysis of variance
Variance
SpouseRuth Eileen Guinness (1917)
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsStatistics, genetics, and evolutionary biology
Institutions
Academic advisorsJames Hopwood Jeans
F. J. M. Stratton[1]
Doctoral students

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS[5] (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, eugenicist, geneticist, and academic.[6] For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science"[7][8] and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics".[9] In genetics, Fisher was the one to most comprehensively combine the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin,[10] as his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Richard Dawkins declared Fisher to be the greatest of Darwin's successors.[11] He is also considered one of the founding fathers of Neo-Darwinism.[12][13] According to statistician Jeffrey T. Leek, Fisher is the most influential scientist of all time based off the number of citations of his contributions.[14]

From 1919, he worked at the Rothamsted Experimental Station for 14 years;[15] there, he analyzed its immense body of data from crop experiments since the 1840s, and developed the analysis of variance (ANOVA). He established his reputation there in the following years as a biostatistician. Fisher also made fundamental contributions to multivariate statistics.[16]

Fisher founded quantitative genetics,[17][18] and together with J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright, is known as one of the three principal founders of population genetics.[19] Fisher outlined Fisher's principle, the Fisherian runaway, the sexy son hypothesis theories of sexual selection, parental investment, and also pioneered linkage analysis and gene mapping.[20][21] On the other hand, as the founder of modern statistics,[22][23] Fisher made countless contributions, including creating the modern method of maximum likelihood and deriving the properties of maximum likelihood estimators,[24] fiducial inference, the derivation of various sampling distributions, founding the principles of the design of experiments, and much more. Fisher's famous 1921 paper alone has been described as "arguably the most influential article" on mathematical statistics in the twentieth century, and equivalent to "Darwin on evolutionary biology, Gauss on number theory, Kolmogorov on probability, and Adam Smith on economics",[25] and is credited with completely revolutionizing statistics.[26] Due to his influence and numerous fundamental contributions, he has been described as the "most original evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century" and as the "greatest statistician of all time".[27] His work is further credited with later initiating the Human Genome Project.[28] Fisher also contributed to the understanding of human blood groups.[29]

Fisher has also been praised as a pioneer of the Information Age.[30] His work on a mathematical theory of information ran parallel to the work of Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, though based on statistical theory.[31][32] A concept to have come out of his work is that of Fisher information.[33] He also had ideas about social sciences,[13] which have been described as a "foundation for evolutionary social sciences".[34]

Fisher held strong views on race and eugenics, insisting on racial differences. Although he was clearly a eugenicist, there is some debate as to whether Fisher supported scientific racism (see Ronald Fisher § Views on race). He was the Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London and editor of the Annals of Eugenics.[35]

  1. ^ Owen, A. R. G. (1962). "An appreciation for the Life and Work of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher". The Statistician. 12 (4): 313. doi:10.2307/2986951. JSTOR 2986951.
  2. ^ a b c Ronald Fisher at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ Newport, Melanie (2013). "African Society of Human Genetics 8th Scientific Meeting held in conjunction with the H3Africa Consortium, May 19th-21st 2013, Accra, Ghana" (PDF). The Galton Institute Newsletter (80): 7–8.
  4. ^ Zimmer, Carl (29 May 2018). She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. Penguin. p. 419. ISBN 978-1101984604.
  5. ^ Yates, F.; Mather, K. (1963). "Ronald Aylmer Fisher 1890–1962". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 9: 91–129. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1963.0006.
  6. ^ Dugard, Pat; File, Portia; Todman, John B. (2012). Single-case and Small-n Experimental Designs: A Practical Guide To Randomization Tests, Second Edition (2nd ed.). New York London: Routledge. p. 135. ISBN 978-0-415-88622-2.
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference Hald98 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ "Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962)". UCL Division of Biosciences. 2 March 2021. Retrieved 12 October 2023.
  9. ^ Efron, Bradley (1998), "R. A. Fisher in the 21st century", Statistical Science, 13 (2): 95–122, doi:10.1214/ss/1028905930.
  10. ^ Berry, Andrew; Browne, Janet (26 July 2022). "Mendel and Darwin". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119 (30): e2122144119. Bibcode:2022PNAS..11922144B. doi:10.1073/pnas.2122144119. PMC 9335214. PMID 35858395.
  11. ^ Edwards, A. W. F. (2011). "Mathematizing Darwin". Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. 65 (3): 421–430. doi:10.1007/s00265-010-1122-x. PMC 3038233. PMID 21423339.
  12. ^ Dawkins, Richard (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. Norton & Company, Inc. p. 113. ISBN 978-0393351491.
  13. ^ a b Esposito, Maurizio (July 2016). "From human science to biology: The second synthesis of Ronald Fisher". History of the Human Sciences. 29 (3): 44–62. doi:10.1177/0952695116653866. S2CID 147742674.
  14. ^ Leek, Jeff (17 February 2014). "Repost: Ronald Fisher is one of the few scientists with a legit claim to most influential scientist ever". Simply Statistics. Retrieved 20 June 2024.
  15. ^ Russell, E. John Russell. "Sir Ronald Fisher". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. Retrieved 23 August 2017.
  16. ^ Anderson, T. W. (1 January 1996). "R. A. Fisher and multivariate analysis". Statistical Science. 11 (1). doi:10.1214/ss/1032209662. ISSN 0883-4237.
  17. ^ Joshi, Amitabh (1 September 1997). "Sir R A Fisher and the evolution of genetics". Resonance. 2 (9): 27–31. doi:10.1007/BF02834578. ISSN 0973-712X.
  18. ^ Visscher, Peter M.; Goddard, Michael E. (2019). "From R.A. Fisher's 1918 Paper to GWAS a Century Later". Genetics. 211 (4): 1125–1130. doi:10.1534/genetics.118.301594. ISSN 0016-6731. PMC 6456325. PMID 30967441.
  19. ^ Thompson, E. A. (1990). "R. A. Fisher's Contributions to Genetical Statistics". Biometrics. 46 (4): 905–914. doi:10.2307/2532436. ISSN 0006-341X. JSTOR 2532436. PMID 2085639.
  20. ^ Crow, James F. (1990). "Fisher's contributions to genetics and evolution". Theoretical Population Biology. 38 (3): ii–275. doi:10.1016/0040-5809(90)90013-L.
  21. ^ Majumder, Partha P. (1992). "Contributions of R. A. Fisher to genetics". Current Science. 62 (4): 334–340. ISSN 0011-3891. JSTOR 24095371.
  22. ^ Rao, C. Radhakrishna (1992). "R. A. Fisher: The Founder of Modern Statistics". Statistical Science. 7 (1): 34–48. doi:10.1214/ss/1177011442. ISSN 0883-4237.
  23. ^ Cite error: The named reference :2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  24. ^ Aldrich, John (1997). "R.A. Fisher and the making of maximum likelihood 1912-1922". Statistical Science. 12 (3): 162–176. doi:10.1214/ss/1030037906. ISSN 0883-4237.
  25. ^ Stigler, Stephen (1 February 2005). "Fisher in 1921". Statistical Science. 20 (1). doi:10.1214/088342305000000025. ISSN 0883-4237.
  26. ^ Inchausti, Pablo (2 November 2022). Statistical Modeling With R: A Dual Frequentist and Bayesian Approach for Life Scientists (1 ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 13–14. doi:10.1093/oso/9780192859013.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-285901-3.
  27. ^ Charlesworth, Brian (2017), "Fisher", in Vonk, Jennifer; Shackelford, Todd (eds.), Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 1–4, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_440-1, ISBN 978-3-319-47829-6, retrieved 20 June 2024
  28. ^ Edwards, A. W. F. (2013). Maloy, Stanley R.; Hughes, Kelly (eds.). Brenner's Encyclopedia of Genetics (2nd ed.). London: Academic Press, Elsevier Science. pp. 48–49. ISBN 978-0-08-096156-9.
  29. ^ Race, R. R. (1964). "Some Notes on Fisher's Contributions to Human Blood Groups". Biometrics. 20 (2): 361–367. doi:10.2307/2528403. ISSN 0006-341X. JSTOR 2528403.
  30. ^ Xiong, Aiping; Proctor, Robert W. (8 August 2018). "Information Processing: The Language and Analytical Tools for Cognitive Psychology in the Information Age". Frontiers in Psychology. 9: 1270. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01270. ISSN 1664-1078. PMC 6092626. PMID 30135664.
  31. ^ Seising, Rudolf (2007). The Fuzzification of Systems: The Genesis of Fuzzy Set Theory and its Initial Applications – Developments up to the 1970s. Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. Vol. 216. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. p. 131. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-71795-9. ISBN 978-3-540-71794-2.
  32. ^ Faucher, Kane X. (2013). Metastasis And Metastability: A Deleuzian Approach to Information. Educational Futures. Rotterdam: SensePublishers. pp. 7–8. doi:10.1007/978-94-6209-428-4. ISBN 978-94-6209-428-4.
  33. ^ Duplantier, Bertrand; Rivasseau, Vincent, eds. (2021). Information Theory: Poincaré Seminar 2018. Progress in Mathematical Physics. Vol. 78. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 70–72. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-81480-9. ISBN 978-3-030-81479-3.
  34. ^ Davis, Jeff (2019), "Ronald Aylmer Fisher", in Shackelford, Todd K.; Weekes-Shackelford, Viviana A. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 6759–6761, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1335-1, ISBN 978-3-319-16999-6, retrieved 31 July 2024
  35. ^ UCL (13 February 2019). "Ronald A Fisher". UCL Division of Biosciences. Retrieved 12 March 2021.