In my last blog , i have discussed regarding how Pearson played important role in modern statistics. Now let me go further with how Fisher got with Pearson. Fisher gave up being a mathematics teacher in 1919 and Karl Pearson offered him the post of chief statistician at the Galton laboratories. He was also offered the post of statistician at the Rothamsted Agricultural Experiment Station, this was the oldest agricultural research institute in the United Kingdom, established in 1837 to study the effects of nutrition and soil types on plant fertility, and it appealed to Fisher's interest in farming. He accepted the post at Rothamsted where he made many contributions both to statistics, in particular the design and analysis of experiments, and to genetics.At this time only he developed randomization and ANOVA.
In the year 1933, Karl Pearson retired as Galton Professor of eugenics at University College and Fisher was appointed to the chair as his successor. In fact the post was split in two, with Karl Pearson's son Egon Pearson also being appointed to a chair. He did retire from his Cambridge chair in 1957 but continued to carry out his duties there for another two years until his successor could be appointed. He then moved to the University of Adelaide where he continued his research for the final three years of his life.
Here comes the dispute between the two pillars, it began in 1917 when Pearson published a paper claiming that Fisher had failed to distinguish likelihood from inverse probability in a paper he wrote in 1915. Although at this stage Fisher was only starting out on his career, he felt angry that Pearson had published an article which was critical of his results without telling him that he was about to do so. Moreover, he did not accept Pearson's criticism, feeling that he was correct criticism, feeling that he was correct. In fact the reasons for this were not nearly as simple as those usually given. The standard explanation is that Fisher became bitter because he suffered serious injustice having his papers rejected by mathematicians who did not understand biology and biologists who did not understand mathematics.
The feud became bitter, however, when Pearson used his position as editor of Biometrika to attack Fisher's use of the chi-squared test in a 1922 paper. Pearson went much further, however, and claimed that Fisher had done a disservice to statistics by widely publishing erroneous results. The Royal Statistical Society then refused to publish Fisher's papers and he resigned from the Society in protest. Of course Fisher also took every opportunity to attack Pearson, and it would be fair to say that each showed hatred towards the other. Even after Pearson died in 1936, Fisher continued his attack on him, which made the atmosphere in University College a very difficult one with Pearson's son Egon Pearson also holding a chair there.
( continue....)
( Taken from Fisher biography)
Comments
Post a Comment