Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic.

[13] From 1919, he worked at the Rothamsted Experimental Station for 14 years;[14] there, he analyzed its immense body of data from crop experiments since the 1840s, and developed the analysis of variance (ANOVA).

[25] Due to his influence and numerous fundamental contributions, he has been described as "the most original evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century" and as "the greatest statistician of all time".

[35] Lifelong poor eyesight caused his rejection by the British Army for World War I,[39] but also developed his ability to visualize problems in geometrical terms, not in writing mathematical solutions, or proofs.

[42] In 1918 he published "The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance", in which he introduced the term variance and proposed its formal analysis.

[43] He put forward a genetics conceptual model showing that continuous variation amongst phenotypic traits measured by biostatisticians could be produced by the combined action of many discrete genes and thus be the result of Mendelian inheritance.

[14] He had been offered a position at the Galton Laboratory in University College London led by Karl Pearson, but instead accepted a temporary role at Rothamsted to investigate the possibility of analysing the vast amount of crop data accumulated since 1842 from the "Classical Field Experiments".

[48] Later assistants who mastered and propagated Fisher's methods were Joseph Oscar Irwin, John Wishart and Frank Yates.

[55] In 1928, Fisher was the first to use diffusion equations to attempt to calculate the distribution of allele frequencies and the estimation of genetic linkage by maximum likelihood methods among populations.

A core work of the neo-Darwinian modern evolutionary synthesis,[57] it helped define population genetics, which Fisher founded alongside Sewall Wright and J.

[69] In 1938, Fisher and Frank Yates described the Fisher–Yates shuffle in their book Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research.

[77] He developed computational algorithms for analyzing data from his balanced experimental designs,[78] with various editions and translations, becoming a standard reference work for scientists in many disciplines.

[79] Fisher publicly spoke out against the 1950 study showing that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer, arguing that correlation does not imply causation.

[80][81][82][83][84][85] To quote his biographers Yates and Mather, "It has been suggested that the fact that Fisher was employed as consultant by the tobacco firms in this controversy casts doubt on the value of his arguments.

He was not above accepting financial reward for his labours, but the reason for his interest was undoubtedly his dislike and mistrust of puritanical tendencies of all kinds; and perhaps also the personal solace he had always found in tobacco.

[89] In the winter of 1954–1955 Fisher met Debabrata Basu, the Indian statistician who wrote in 1988, "With his reference set argument, Sir Ronald was trying to find a via media between the two poles of Statistics – Berkeley and Bayes.

[92] During this time, he continued in his denial of tobacco harm, and enlisted German eugenicist Otmar von Verschuer to his cause.

[112] According to Yates and Mather, "His large family, in particular, reared in conditions of great financial stringency, was a personal expression of his genetic and evolutionary convictions.

H. Allen Orr describes him in the Boston Review as a "deeply devout Anglican who, between founding modern statistics and population genetics, penned articles for church magazines".

[113] In a 1955 broadcast on Science and Christianity,[86] he said: The custom of making abstract dogmatic assertions is not, certainly, derived from the teaching of Jesus, but has been a widespread weakness among religious teachers in subsequent centuries.

The statement, along with the comments and criticisms of a large number of scientists including Fisher, is published in "The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry" (1952).

[116]: 56  Muller's criticism was recorded in more detail and was noted to "represent an important trend of ideas": I quite agree with the chief intention of the article as a whole, which, I take it, is to bring out the relative unimportance of such genetic mental differences between races as may exist, in contrast to the importance of the mental differences (between individuals as well as between nations) caused by tradition, training and other aspects of the environment.

[116]: 52 Fisher's own words were quoted as follows: As you ask for remarks and suggestions, there is one that occurs to me, unfortunately of a somewhat fundamental nature, namely that the Statement as it stands appears to draw a distinction between the body and mind of men, which must, I think, prove untenable.

Mahalanobis, and significantly contributed to the development of the Indian Statistical Institute; and Fisher's graduate students included Walter Bodmer, a child of Jewish-German parents who fled from Nazi Germany while he was young, and Ebenezer Laing, an African geneticist from Ghana.

[120] However, British historian Robert J. Evans, writing in The New Statesman, argued that Fisher's views on eugenics and his opposition to UNESCO's statement about genetic racial differences were indicative of racism.

The last third of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection focused on eugenics, attributing the fall of civilizations to the fertility of their upper classes being diminished, and used British 1911 census data to show an inverse relationship between fertility and social class, which was partly due, he claimed, to the lower financial costs and hence increasing social status of families with fewer children.

[132] In 1950, Maurice Wilkes and David Wheeler used the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator to solve a differential equation relating to gene frequencies in a paper by Ronald Fisher.

[135] Geoffrey Miller said of him:To biologists, he was an architect of the "modern synthesis" that used mathematical models to integrate Mendelian genetics with Darwin's selection theories.

To farmers, Fisher was the founder of experimental agricultural research, saving millions from starvation through rational crop breeding programs.

"[120] In June 2020, during the international protests caused by the murder of George Floyd, Gonville and Caius College announced that a 1989 stained-glass window commemorating Fisher's work would be removed because of his connection with eugenics.