POP QUIZ GO: What Englishman was it that Anders Hall called “a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science”?

It’s the same guy who Richard Dawkins labeled “the greatest biologist since Darwin.”

Give up? It’s SIR RONALD FISHER!

An evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and statistician, Fisher lived from 1890 to 1962. He had plans to enter the British Army upon his graduation from the University of Cambridge (where he studied biology/eugenics) in 1912, but he had horrible eyesight and failed the vision test. So what did he do instead? He worked as a statistician for London, among other things. He also started to write for the Eugenic Review, which only increased his interest in stat methods.

In 1918, his paper The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance was published in which he introduced the method of analysis of variance (yup, ANOVA!). A year later, after taking a job with an agricultural station, he began to gather numerous sets of data—both large and small—which allowed him to develop methods of experimental design as well as small sample statistics. Throughout his professional career, he continued to develop ANOVA, promoted ML estimation, described the z-distribution (now used in the form of the F-distribution), and pretty much set up the foundation for the field of population genetics. He also (and I didn’t know this until I read more about him) opposed Bayesian statistics quite vehemently.

Anyway. Thought he deserved a bit of a mention today, since he died on this day in 1962.