page_title: Ronald Fisher
section_title: Personal life and beliefs
hierarchical_section_title: Ronald Fisher / Personal life and beliefs
caption_attribution_description: Stained glass window in the dining hall of Gonville and Caius College, in Cambridge (UK), commemorating Ronald A. Fisher, geneticist and statistician, who was a fellow and president of the college. The window represents a 7 by 7 Latin square, an experimental design used in statistics; the text on the windows reads: R.A. FISHER; FELLOW 1920-1926 1943-1962; PRESIDENT 1956-1959.
context_page_description: Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS was a British statistician, geneticist, eugenicist, and professor. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Fisher has been called "the greatest of Darwin’s successors".
  Fisher held strong views on race. Notably, he was a dissenting voice in the 1950 UNESCO statement The Race Question, insisting on racial differences.
  From 1919 onward, he worked at the Rothamsted Experimental Station for 14 years; there, he analysed its immense data from crop experiments since the 1840s, and developed the analysis of variance. He established his reputation there in the following years as a biostatistician.
  He is known as one of the three principal founders of population genetics.
context_section_description: He married Eileen Guinness, with whom he had two sons and six daughters.
  His marriage disintegrated during World War II, and his older son George, an aviator, was killed in combat. His daughter Joan, who wrote a biography of her father, married the statistician George E. P. Box.
  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." Fisher was noted for being loyal, and was seen as a patriot, a member of the Church of England, politically conservative, as well as a scientific rationalist. He developed a reputation for carelessness in his dress and was the archetype of the absent-minded professor. 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". In a 1955 broadcast on Science and Christianity, 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. I do not think that the word for the Christian virtue of faith should be prostituted to mean the credulous acceptance of all such piously intended assertions. Much self-deception in the young believer is needed to convince himself that he knows that of which in reality he knows himself to be ignorant. That surely is hypocrisy, against which we have been most conspicuously warned.
  Fisher was involved with the Society for Psychical Research.
caption: Stained glass window in the dining hall of Caius College, in Cambridge, commemorating Ronald Fisher and representing a Latin square, discussed by him in The Design of Experiments
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