Fisher, R.A.. - a memoir

Abstract

Since my mathematical statistics, such as they were, are the greatest thing in my life, R.A. Fisher, their finest exponent, was the greatest man in my life, though I had little personal contact with him. There were very few of us around in Fisher's early research days but all we had to do was to keep up with him. I still recall my pride at H . Hotelling's numbering me amongst some half dozen "disciples of R.A. Fisher". I have long since ceased to read, still less study, mathstat papers. There are thousands nowadays with which the conscientious young researchers have to try to cope. But my colleagues amongst them tell me that there has been no break-through comparable with that of Fisher's; this is also evident from work in applied statistics, since most of the functions still used derive from Fisher, so familiar that his name has ceased to appear in the references, a fate reserved for many of old. After the great exponents of the mathematical theory of probability (the Bernoullis, Laplace, Gauss, etc., Laplace the greatest from the statistical point of view), there was Bravais (the correlation coefficient), Karl Pearson (chi-squared and most else up to his time) and Fisher (the largest stride forward since the mathematicians of probability).