Sir Ronald Fisher | |
---|---|
Born |
East Finchley, London, England |
17 February 1890
Died | 29 July 1962 Adelaide, South Australia |
(aged 72)
Residence | England and Australia |
Nationality | British |
Fields | Statistics, Genetics, and Evolutionary biology |
Institutions | Rothamsted Research, University College London, Cambridge University, University of Adelaide, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation |
Alma mater | Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge |
Academic advisors | James Hopwood Jeans and F. J. M. Stratton |
Doctoral students | C. R. Rao, D. J. Finney, and Walter Bodmer |
Known for | Fisher's principle |
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962), who published as R. A. Fisher, was an English statistician and biologist who 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. He was a prominent eugenicist in the early part of his life.
He worked at Rothamsted Research for 14 years from 1919, where he developed the analysis of variance (ANOVA) to analyse its immense data from crop experiments since the 1840s, and established his reputation there in the following years as a biostatistician. He is known as one of the three principal founders of population genetics. He outlined Fisher's principle as well as the Fisherian runaway and sexy son hypothesis theories of sexual selection. He also made important contributions to statistics, including the maximum likelihood, fiducial inference, the derivation of various sampling distributions among many others.
Anders Hald called him "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science", while Richard Dawkins named him "the greatest biologist since Darwin":