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5 unusual facts about Ronald Fisher


Block design

A fundamental theorem, Fisher's inequality, named after the statistician Ronald Fisher, is that b ≥ v in any 2-design.

Combinatorial design

Some of the basic theory of combinatorial designs originated in the statistician Ronald Fisher's work on the design of biological experiments.

Emil Julius Gumbel

As a mathematician, Gumbel was instrumental in the development of extreme value theory, along with Leonard Tippett and Ronald Fisher.

Ron Fisher

Ronald Fisher, English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist

Shirley Poppy

The rancorous debate between genetics and biometrics, in which the Shirley poppy became embroiled, was only resolved through the work of Ronald Fisher who showed that the two schools of thought were actually compatible.


Annals of Mathematical Statistics

In 1938, Samuel Wilks became editor-in-chief of the Annals and recruited a remarkable editorial staff: Fisher, Neyman, Cramér, Hotelling, Egon Pearson, Georges Darmois, Allen T. Craig, Deming, von Mises, H. L. Rietz, and Shewhart.

Eric John Godley

Born in the Auckland suburb of Devonport to parents Rupert and Louise E. Godley, Godley grew up in Auckland and did his BSc at MSc at Auckland University College, followed by service in World War II and a PhD at Cambridge in cytology and genetics under Ronald Fisher.

Fisher information

The role of the Fisher information in the asymptotic theory of maximum-likelihood estimation was emphasized by the statistician R.A. Fisher (following some initial results by F. Y. Edgeworth).

Fisher's z-distribution

It was first described by Ronald Fisher in a paper delivered at the International Mathematical Congress of 1924 in Toronto, entitled "On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well-known statistics" (Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematics, Toronto, 2: 805-813 (1924).

Kernel methods

Algorithms capable of operating with kernels include Support vector machine (SVM), Gaussian processes, Fisher's linear discriminant analysis (LDA), principal components analysis (PCA), canonical correlation analysis, ridge regression, spectral clustering, linear adaptive filters and many others.

Quantitative genetics

The field was founded by the originators of the modern synthesis, R.A. Fisher, Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane, and aimed to predict the response to selection given data on the phenotype and relationships of individuals.

Relative species abundance

The logseries was developed by Ronald Fisher to fit two different abundance data sets: British moth species (collected by Carrington Williams) and Malaya butterflies (collected by Alexander Steven Corbet).

Samuel S. Wilks

Wilks assembled an advisory board for the journal that included major figures in statistics and probability, among them Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, and Egon Pearson.

Statistical process control

Shewhart read the new statistical theories coming out of Britain, especially the work of "Student", Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher.


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