The Significance of Fisher: A Review ofR.A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist
- 1 December 1980
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of the American Statistical Association
- Vol. 75 (372) , 1019-1030
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1980.10477590
Abstract
A number of colleagues have made helpful criticism and comments. They certainly do not uniformly agree with my judgments and emphases, but my warm appreciation goes to Keith Baker, Albert Biderman, Richard Brown, K. Alexander Brownlee, Donald T. Campbell, William G. Cochran, Lee J. Cronbach, Cuthbert Daniel, F.N. David, Arthur P. Dempster, Churchill Eisenhart, Stephen E. Fienberg, David Finney, Milton Friedman, I.J. Good, Bernard G. Greenberg, N.T. Gridgeman, William Jaffé, Oscar Kempthorne, Erich L. Lehmann, Richard C. Lewontin, Donald MacKenzie, William G. Madow, Margaret E. Martin, Frederick Mosteller, Jerzy Neyman, John W. Pratt, Donald B. Rubin, I.R. Savage, Hilary L. Seal, Hanan Selvin, Oscar B. Sheynin, David L. Sills, Theodor D. Sterling, George Stigler, Stephen M. Stigler, Fred L. Strodtbeck, Alan Stuart, Judith M. Tanur, Ronald Thisted, Howard Wainer, Frank Yates, Arnold Zellner and Harriet Zuckerman. Joan Fisher Box's biography of R.A. Fisher presents a lively and detailed description of his life and scientific work, both in statistics and genetics. The book's greatest contribution is the background and motivation it provides in studying Fisher's ideas. The book's major weaknesses are its failure to confront fundamental paradoxes in Fisher's thought and its lack of precision at some points of exposition. The review includes discussions of randomization, significance testing, and eugenics.Keywords
This publication has 24 references indexed in Scilit:
- R. A. Fisher and the Design of Experiments, 1922-1926The American Statistician, 1980
- R.A. Fisher: An AppreciationPublished by Springer Nature ,1980
- In Defence of Biography: The Use of Biography in the History of ScienceHistory of Science, 1979
- Why randomize?Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, 1977
- Beyond the two disciplines of scientific psychology.American Psychologist, 1975
- The Economic and Social Context of the Marginal Revolution of the 1870'sHistory of Political Economy, 1972
- Some Aspects of Experimental InferenceJournal of the American Statistical Association, 1966
- R. A. Fisher and the Last Fifty Years of Statistical MethodologyJournal of the American Statistical Association, 1965
- Further aspects of the theory of multiple regressionMathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 1938
- The vector representation of a sampleMathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 1934