Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer

Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer, 1890–1962, English statistician and geneticist, b. East Finchley, Middlesex, England; educated at Cambridge Univ. (1909–1915; Sc.D., 1926). From 1919 to 1933 he worked at the Rothamsted Experimental Station. He was professor of genetics at University College, London (1933–43) and at Cambridge (1943–57) and conducted research at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Adelaide, Australia from 1957 until his death. He revolutionized inferential statistics, developing the concepts of analysis of variants and factorial experimentation. He wrote the classic Statistical Methods for Research Workers (1925) and Design of Experiments and Statistical Methods (1934). He also made extraordinary contributions to the field of genetics and statistically reconciled the principals of Mendelian inheritance with Darwin's notion of natural selection. He wrote the seminal work The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930).

Bibliography

See J. F. Box, The Life of a Scientist (1978); R. A. Fisher, Statistical Inference and Analysis (1990; selected correspondence).