Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer, British statistician and geneticist whose development of experimental design and statistical techniques facilitated the investigation of biological materials. He received a knighthood in 1952.
Born in London and educated at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, Fisher graduated in mathematics in 1913 and spent two years as a statistician with an investment company.Too short sighted for military services, he taught at Rugby School for the duration of World War 1.
In 1919, he joined Rothamsted Experimental Station as head of the statistics department. In 1918 Fisher published the results of his statistical analysis of characters that show continuous variation, such as human stature.
By his treatment (partition) of the statistical variance, he was able to distinguish between variation due to environmental factors and that due to genetic factors; the latter were confirmed as being largely determined by the cumulative effects of many separate genes, each inherited according to Mendelian principle.
Fisher subsequently did much to improve experimental methodology by introducing the concepts of random sampling and the technique of analysis of variance, which qualifies sources of variations in an experiment.
His books notably Statistical Methods for Research Workers (1925), The Design of Experiment (1935), and Statistical Tables (1938), form the foundation of statistical analysis in modern biological experimentation.
Fisher’s mathematical study of genes and their mutations populations demonstrated how Mendelian genetics is consistent with the Darwinian view of evolution by natural selection, making The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930) one of the seminal works of neo-Darwinism.
Fisher became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1929. In 1933 he was appointed Galton Professor of Eugenics at University Collage, London, and thereafter professor of genetics at Cambridge University (1943 – 57) until his retirement.
From 1960 he spent the remainder of his life working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)in Adelaide, Australia.
Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer (1890 – 1962)
