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
done plans experiments
The best time to plan an experiment is after you've done it.
evolution natural natural-selection
Natural selection is not evolution.
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.
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.
pythagorean-theorem analysis method
The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.
knowledge science form
Experimental observations are only experience carefully planned in advance, and designed to form a secure basis of new knowledge.
science light biology
It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence, rather than their occurrence, which becomes highly improbable.
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.
odds giving levels
If one in twenty does not seem high enough odds, we may, if we prefer it, draw the line at one in fifty (the 2 per cent. point), or one in a hundred (the 1 per cent. point). Personally, the writer prefers to set a low standard of significance at the 5 per cent. point, and ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level. A scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if a properly designed experiment rarely fails to give this level of significance.
data issues body
Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.
research natural dogmatism
In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research.
statistics procedures interpretation
... the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation.