John Nelder

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John Ashworth Nelder
Rothamsted Experimental Station
Imperial College London

John Ashworth Nelder FRS (8 October 1924 – 7 August 2010) was a British statistician known for his contributions to experimental design, analysis of variance, computational statistics, and statistical theory.

Contributions

Nelder's work was influential in statistics. While leading research at

block experiments
, an area where Nelder made many contributions.

In

maximum likelihood
estimation of the model parameters.

In

frequentist and Bayesian
statistics.

In

optimization, Nelder and Roger Mead proposed the Nelder–Mead simplex heuristic
, widely used in engineering and statistics.

Biography

Born in Brushford, near Dulverton, Somerset, Nelder was educated at Blundell's School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he read Mathematics.

Nelder's appointments included Head of the Statistics Section at the

Rothamsted Experimental Station from 1968 to 1984.[3] During his time at Wellesbourne he spent a year (1965–1966) at the Waite Institute in Adelaide, South Australia, where he worked with Graham Wilkinson on Genstat. He held an appointment as Visiting Professor at Imperial College London
from 1972 onwards.

He was responsible, with

Max Nicholson and James Ferguson-Lees, for debunking the Hastings Rarities – sightings of a series of rare birds, preserved by a taxidermist and provided with bogus histories.[4]

Nelder died on 7 August 2010 in

Luton and Dunstable Hospital, taken there after a fall at home, which was incidental to the cause of death.[5]

Awards and distinctions

Nelder was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976[6] and received the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in Gold in 2005. He was also the recipient of the inaugural Karl Pearson Prize of the International Statistical Institute, with Peter McCullagh, "for their monograph Generalized Linear Models (1983)".[7]

As tribute on his eightieth birthday, a festschrift Methods and Models in Statistics: In Honour of Professor John Nelder, FRS was edited by Niall Adams, Martin Crowder, David J Hand & Dave Stephens, Imperial College Press (2004).[8]

The first annual John Nelder memorial lecture was held at Imperial College London, on 8 March 2012, as part of the Mathematics department Colloquium series. The lecture was given by John's long term co-author, Peter McCullagh. An interview[9] with Peter McCullagh, about statistical modelling, includes some reminiscences about John.

Selected publications

References

  1. ^ Payne, Roger; Senn, Stephen (23 September 2010). "John Nelder obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 December 2013.
  2. JSTOR 2344614
    .
  3. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2019.0013
    .
  4. ^ Nelder, J.A. (1962). A statistical examination of the Hastings Rarities. British Birds, August 1962.
  5. ^ Payne, Roger. "John Ashworth Nelder". VSN International. Archived from the original on 7 March 2014. Retrieved 17 November 2020.
  6. ^ Royal Society citation
  7. ^ "The inaugural Karl Pearson Prize". The International Statistical Institute. Archived from the original on 8 November 2014. Retrieved 8 November 2014.
  8. ^ "Imperial College Press Newsletter". Archived from the original on 14 July 2006.
  9. ^ Podcast ma.ic.ac.uk

External links

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