R. A. Fisher
| Sir Ronald Fisher | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
17 February 1890 East Finchley, London, England |
| Died | 29 July 1962 (aged 72) Adelaide, South Australia |
| 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 |
| Influenced | |
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 helped to create the new Darwinist synthesis of evolution known as the modern evolutionary synthesis. He was also 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". Not only was he the most original and constructive of the architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Fisher also was the father of modern statistics and experimental design. He therefore could be said to have provided researchers in biology and medicine with their most important research tools, as well as with the modern version of biology's central theorem".Geoffrey Miller said of him "To biologists, he was an architect of the 'modern synthesis' that used mathematical models to integrate Mendelian genetics with Darwin's selection theories. To psychologists, Fisher was the inventor of various statistical tests that are still supposed to be used whenever possible in psychology journals. To farmers, Fisher was the founder of experimental agricultural research, saving millions from starvation through rational crop breeding programs."
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