Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher 1890-1962, English statistician and geneticist, b. East Finchley, Middlesex, England; educated at Cambridge (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).

Fisher, SirRonaldAylmer (1890–1962)The British statistician and geneticist who demonstrated mathematically that Mendel's laws must lead to the results observed and that these laws accorded well with Darwins's theory of evolution by natural selection. He pioneered the application of statistical methods to data derived from genetic and ecological studies. He worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station from 1919 until his appointment as professor of genetics at the University of Cambridge in 1943. In 1959 he joined the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia.