Ronald Fisher

Ronald Fisher

A British statistician and geneticist who assembled much of the modern toolkit of statistical inference: maximum likelihood estimation, analysis of variance, the design of randomised experiments, significance testing, and the measure of information that bears his name. His 1936 paper on linear discriminant analysis, using the iris flower measurements still bundled with machine learning libraries today, is one of the first published classification algorithms. His statistical work is inseparable from his lifelong advocacy of eugenics, a part of his legacy that later generations of statisticians have publicly reckoned with. (See also: Thomas Bayes, Machine learning, Training data)