Ronald Fisher
Ronald Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS, who published as R. A. Fisher, was an English statistician, and biologist, who used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection, helping to create a new Darwinist synthesis of evolution known as modern evolutionary synthesis, as well as a prominent eugenicist in the early part of his life...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth17 February 1890
died english-mathematician perform
To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of.
pythagorean-theorem analysis method
The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.
research natural dogmatism
In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research.
nature views trials
No aphorism is more frequently repeated in connection with field trials, than that we must ask Nature few questions, or, ideally, one question, at a time. The writer is convinced that this view is wholly mistaken. Nature, he suggests, will best respond to a logical and carefully thought out questionnaire; indeed, if we ask her a single question, she will often refuse to answer until some other topic has been discussed.
believe special fields
I believe that no one who is familiar, either with mathematical advances in other fields, or with the range of special biological conditions to be considered, would ever conceive that everything could be summed up in a single mathematical formula, however complex.
done plans experiments
The best time to plan an experiment is after you've done it.
knowledge world inference
Inductive inference is the only process known to us by which essentially new knowledge comes into the world.
variation experiments related
We have usually no knowledge that any one factor will exert its effects independently of all others that can be varied, or that its effects are particularly simply related to variations in these other factors.
mean past ideas
More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists , and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.
may chance natural
No isolated experiment, however significant in itself, can suffice for the experimental demonstration of any natural phenomenon; for the "one chance in a million" will undoubtedly occur, with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.
mean two theory-of-evolution
Natural Selection is not Evolution. Yet, ever since the two words have been in common use, the theory of Natural Selection has been employed as a convenient abbreviation for the theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection, put forward by Darwin and Wallace. This has had the unfortunate consequence that the theory of Natural Selection itself has scarcely ever, if ever, received separate consideration.
thinking law fundamentals
Professor Eddington has recently remarked that 'The law that entropy always increases the second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature'. It is not a little instructive that so similar a law [the fundamental theorem of natural selection] should hold the supreme position among the biological sciences.
phrases may tests
(Coining the phrase 'test of significance'): Critical tests of this kind may be called tests of significance, and when such tests are available we may discover whether a second sample is or is not significantly different from the first.
responsibility understanding process
The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the process he applies or recommends.