Ronald Aylmer Fisher

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS

(* 17. Februar 1890 in London, England; † 29. Juli 1962 in Adelaide, Australien) war einer der bedeutendsten Genetiker, Evolutionstheoretiker und Statistiker des 20. Jahrhunderts. Der britische Biologe Richard Dawkins bezeichnet ihn als "The greatest of Darwin’s successors," und Historiker der Statistik Anders Hald schreibt "Fisher was a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science."

Beiträge zur Statistik

R.A. Fisher führte das Maximum-Likelihood-Prinzip und das statistische Verfahren der Varianzanalyse (ANOVA, analysis of variance) ein, er lieferte bedeutende Beiträge zur statistischen Versuchsplanung und postulierte die schätztheoretischen Konzepte der Suffizienz, Ancillary Statistik und Fisher Information. Dies machte ihn zu einem der bedeutensten Statistiker des 20. Jahrhundertes.

Sein Artikel "On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics" präsentiert Karl Pearson's Χ²-Verteilung und Student's t-Verteilung im selben wahrscheinlichkeitstheoretischen Rahmen wie die Normalverteilung und die nach ihm benannte F-(Fisher-)Verteilung. Fisher's Buch Statistical methods for research workers beschreibt wie diese Verteilungen benutzt werden können.

Fisher information

He introduced the concept of Fisher information in 1925, many years before Shannon's notion of entropy. Fisher information has been the subject of renewed interest in the last few years, both due to the growth of Bayesian inference in AI, and due to B. Roy Frieden's book Physics from Fisher Information, which attempts to derive the laws of physics from a Fisherian starting point.

Brief biography

He was born in East Finchley, London and obtained a B.A. degree in mathematics, not astronomy as is often said, from Cambridge University in 1912. In 1911 he was involved in the formation of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society. His studies of errors in astronomical calculations, together with his interests in genetics and natural selection, led to involvement in statistics.

From 1919 he worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station making contributions in statistics and genetics. In 1933 he became a professor of eugenics at University College London moving in 1943 to the Balfour chair of genetics at Cambridge.

He received various awards for his work and was made a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in 1952. He had a long running feud with Karl Pearson (he declined a post at the University of London), and later with Pearson's son E.S. Pearson. After retiring from Cambridge he spent some time as a research fellow at the CSIRO in Adelaide, Australia where he died in 1962.

Bibliography

A selection from Fisher's 395 articles

(The following are all available on the University of Adelaide website)

• "Frequency distribution of the values of the correlation coefficient in samples from an indefinitely large population." Biometrika, 10: 507-521. (1915)
• "The correlation between relatives on the supposition of Mendelian inheritance" Trans. Roy. Soc. Edinb., 52: 399-433. (1918). It was in this paper the the word variance was first introduced into probability theory and statistics.
• "On the mathematical foundations of theoretical statistics" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A, 222: 309-368. (1922)
• "On the dominance ratio. Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinb., 42: 321-341. (1922)
• "On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics" Proc. Int. Cong. Math., Toronto, 2: 805-813. (1924)
• "Theory of statistical estimation" Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 22: 700-725 (1925)
• "Applications of Student's distribution" Metron, 5: 90-104 (1925)
• "The arrangement of field experiments" J. Min. Agric. G. Br., 33: 503-513. (1926)
• "The general sampling distribution of the multiple correlation coefficient" Proceedings of Royal Society, A, 121: 654-673 (1928)
• "Two new properties of mathematical likelihood" Proceedings of Royal Society, A, 144: 285-307 (1934)

Books by Fisher

(Full publication details are available on the University of Adelaide website)

• Statistical methods for research workers (1925)
• The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930)
• The design of experiments (1935)
• Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research (1938, coauthor:Frank Yates)
• The theory of inbreeding (1949)
• Contributions to mathematical statistics (1950)
• Statistical methods and statistical inference (1956)

Biographies of Fisher

• Fisher Box J (1978) R. A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist, New York: Wiley.
• Yates F & Mather K (1963) Ronald Aylmer Fisher. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 9:91-120 Available on University of Adelaide website

External links

• Biography at MacTutor
• A Guide to R. A. Fisher by John Aldrich
• Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics for Fisher’s contribution to the language of statistics
• University of Adelaide Library for bibliography, biography, 2 volumes of correspondence and many articles
• Classics in the History of Psychology for the first edition of Statistical Methods for Research Workers
• [http://www.economics.soton.ac.uk/staff/aldrich/fisherguide/quotations.htm A collection of Fisher quotations compiled by A. W. F. Edwards

Lebenswerk

Eines seiner Hauptverdienste wurde erst postum veröffentlicht: Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances. Dieses Essay beinhaltet einen Spezialfall des Satzes von Bayes. Weiterhin ist bekannt, dass er folgende Werke im Laufe seines Lebens veröffentlicht hat:

1. Divine Benevolence, or an Attempt to Prove That the Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His Creatures
2. An Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxions, and a Defence of the Mathematicians Against the Objections of the Author of the Analyst

Literatur

• Dale, Andrew I.: Most honourable rememberance. - New York : Springer, 2003
• Leonard, Thomas: Bayesian methods. - Cambridge : Univ. Pr., 1999
• Swinburne, Richard: Bayes's theorem. - Oxford : Univ. Pr., 2002

Siehe auch: Bayes-Theorem (Satz von Bayes), Bayesscher Wahrscheinlichkeitsbegriff, Bayes-Klassifikator