arguably the most influential statistician of the twentieth century. Fisher was educated at Harrow and at Cambridge U, where he studied mathematics. His initial interest in statistics developed because of his interest in genetics, and he pursued both subjects for the rest of his life. Fisher's first paper introduced the method of maximum likelihood, his second the mathematical derivation of the t-distribution, and his third the distribution of the correlation coefficient. Following the First World War (which saw Fisher employed as a teacher because his dreadful eyesight prevented him from fighting), he joined the agricultural research centre at Rothamsted. During his time there he virtually invented the subjects of experimental design and ANOVA, which motivated his derivation of the F-distribution. In 1925 the first edition of his Statistical Methods for Research Workers appeared. The extent of the influence of this work can be gauged from the fact that there was a new edition about every three years until 1958, and a posthumous fourteenth edition in 1970. At a conference in India he said ‘To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a postmortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of’. In 1933 he became Professor of Eugenics at UCL and in 1943 Professor of Genetics at Cambridge U, where Rao was one of his research students. He was elected FRS in 1929 and was awarded the Society's Copley Medal in 1955. He was elected to membership of the NAS in 1948 and was knighted in 1952. He was President of the RSS in 1952 and was awarded its Guy Medal in Gold in 1946.

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/special/mss/fisher/gateway.html Web archive with photograph and links.