44 Facts About Ronald Fisher

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic.

Ronald Fisher established his reputation there in the following years as a biostatistician.

Haldane and Sewall Wright, Ronald Fisher is known as one of the three principal founders of population genetics.

Ronald Fisher held strong views on race and eugenics, insisting on racial differences.

Ronald Fisher was the Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London and editor of the Annals of Eugenics.

Ronald Fisher was one of twins, with the other twin being still-born and grew up the youngest, with three sisters and one brother.

Ronald Fisher entered Harrow School age 14 and won the school's Neeld Medal in mathematics.

Ronald Fisher put forward a genetics conceptual model showing that continuous variation amongst phenotypic traits measured by biostatisticians could be produced by the combined action of many discrete genes and thus be the result of Mendelian inheritance.

Ronald Fisher had been offered a position at the Galton Laboratory in University College London led by Karl Pearson, but instead accepted a temporary role at Rothamsted to investigate the possibility of analysing the vast amount of crop data accumulated since 1842 from the "Classical Field Experiments".

Ronald Fisher analysed the data recorded over many years, and in 1921 published Studies in Crop Variation I, his first application of the analysis of variance.

Later assistants who mastered and propagated Ronald Fisher's methods were Joseph Oscar Irwin John Wishart and Frank Yates.

Between 1912 and 1922 Ronald Fisher recommended, analyzed and vastly popularized the maximum likelihood estimation method.

Ronald Fisher pioneered the principles of the design of experiments and the statistics of small samples and the analysis of real data.

Ronald Fisher's method is a technique for data fusion or "meta-analysis".

Ronald Fisher proposes the level p=0.05, or a 1 in 20 chance of being exceeded by chance, as a limit for statistical significance, and applies this to a normal distribution, yielding the rule of two standard deviations for statistical significance.

In 1928, Ronald Fisher was the first to use diffusion equations to attempt to calculate the distribution of allele frequencies and the estimation of genetic linkage by maximum likelihood methods among populations.

Ronald Fisher's fame grew, and he began to travel and lecture widely.

In 1933, Ronald Fisher became the head of the Department of Eugenics at University College London.

Ronald Fisher was the guest of honour at its 25th anniversary in 1957, when it had 2000 employees.

In 1936, Ronald Fisher used a Pearson's chi-squared test to analyze Mendel's data and concluded that Mendel's results were far too perfect, suggesting that adjustments had been made to the data to make the observations fit the hypothesis.

Later authors have claimed Ronald Fisher's analysis was flawed, proposing various statistical and botanical explanations for Mendel's numbers.

In 1947, Ronald Fisher co-founded the journal Heredity with Cyril Darlington and in 1949 he published The Theory of Inbreeding.

Ronald Fisher developed computational algorithms for analyzing data from his balanced experimental designs, with various editions and translations, becoming a standard reference work for scientists in many disciplines.

Ronald Fisher publicly spoke out against the 1950 study showing that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer, arguing that correlation does not imply causation.

Ronald Fisher was not above accepting financial reward for his labours, but the reason for his interest was undoubtedly his dislike and mistrust of puritanical tendencies of all kinds; and perhaps the personal solace he had always found in tobacco.

Ronald Fisher gave the 1953 Croonian lecture on population genetics.

In 1957, a retired Ronald Fisher emigrated to Australia, where he spent time as a senior research fellow at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Adelaide, South Australia.

Ronald Fisher's remains are interred in St Peter's Cathedral, Adelaide.

Ronald Fisher married Eileen Guinness, with whom he had two sons and six daughters.

Ronald Fisher's marriage disintegrated during World War II, and his older son George, an aviator, was killed in combat.

Ronald Fisher developed a reputation for carelessness in his dress and was the archetype of the absent-minded professor.

Ronald Fisher was one of four scientists who opposed the statement.

Ronald Fisher's opinions are clarified by his more detailed comments on Section 5 of the statement, which are concerned with psychological and mental differences between the races.

Ronald Fisher ended a 1954 letter to Reginald Ruggles Gates, a Canadian-born geneticist who argued that different racial groups were different species, with the words:.

In 1911 Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes, R C Punnett, and Horace Darwin.

Ronald Fisher saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues that encompassed and drove his interest in both genetics and statistics.

Ronald Fisher proposed the abolition of extra allowances to large families, with the allowances proportional to the earnings of the father.

Ronald Fisher was elected to the Royal Society in 1929, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1934, the American Philosophical Society in 1941, and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1948.

Ronald Fisher won the Copley Medal and the Royal Medal.

Ronald Fisher was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1924 in Toronto and in 1928 in Bologna.

The Kent distribution was named after him and Christopher Bingham in 1982, while the Ronald Fisher kernel was named after Ronald Fisher in 1998.

The R A Fisher Lectureship was a North American Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies annual lecture prize, established in 1963, until the name was changed to COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship in 2020.

On 28 April 1998 a minor planet, 21451 Ronald Fisher, was named after him.

Not only was he the most original and constructive of the architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, Ronald Fisher was the father of modern statistics and experimental design.