Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, byname R.A. Fisher, (born February 17, 1890, London, England—died July 29, 1962, Adelaide, Australia), British statistician and geneticist who pioneered the application of statistical procedures to the design of scientific experiments.

In 1909 Fisher was awarded a scholarship to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1912 with a B.A. in astronomy. He remained at Cambridge for another year to continue course work in astronomy and physics and to study the theory of errors. (The connection between astronomy and statistics dates back to Carl Friedrich Gauss, who formulated the law of observational error and the normal distribution based on his analysis of astronomical observations.)

Fisher taught high school mathematics and physics from 1914 until 1919 while continuing his research in statistics and genetics. Fisher had evidenced a keen interest in evolutionary theory during his student days—he was a founder of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society—and he combined his training in statistics with his avocation for genetics. In particular, he published an important paper in 1918 in which he used powerful statistical tools to reconcile what had been apparent inconsistencies between Charles Darwin’s ideas of natural selection and the recently rediscovered experiments of the Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel.

In 1919 Fisher became the statistician for the Rothamsted Experimental Station near Harpenden, Hertfordshire, and did statistical work associated with the plant-breeding experiments conducted there. His Statistical Methods for Research Workers (1925) remained in print for more than 50 years. His breeding experiments led to theories about gene dominance and fitness, published in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930). In 1933 Fisher became Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College, London. From 1943 to 1957 he was Balfour Professor of Genetics at Cambridge. He investigated the linkage of genes for different traits and developed methods of multivariate analysis to deal with such questions.

At Rothamsted Fisher designed plant-breeding experiments that provided greater information with less investments of time, effort, and money. One major problem he encountered was avoiding biased selection of experimental materials, which results in inaccurate or misleading experimental data. To avoid such bias, Fisher introduced the principle of randomization. This principle states that before an effect in an experiment can be ascribed to a given cause or treatment independently of other causes or treatments, the experiment must be repeated on a number of control units of the material and that all units of material used in the experiments must be randomly selected samples from the whole population they are intended to represent. In this way, random selection is used to diminish the effects of variability in experimental materials.

An even more important achievement was Fisher’s origination of the concept of analysis of variance, or ANOVA. This statistical procedure enabled experiments to answer several questions at once. Fisher’s principal idea was to arrange an experiment as a set of partitioned subexperiments that differ from each other in one or more of the factors or treatments applied in them. By permitting differences in their outcome to be attributed to the different factors or combinations of factors by means of statistical analysis, these subexperiments constituted a notable advance over the prevailing procedure of varying only one factor at a time in an experiment. It was later found that the problems of bias and multivariate analysis that Fisher had solved in his plant-breeding research are encountered in many other scientific fields as well.

Fisher summed up his statistical work in Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference (1956). He was knighted in 1952 and spent the last years of his life conducting research in Australia.