John Nelder Information
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.
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Contributions
Nelder's work was very influential in statistics. While leading research at Rothamsted Experimental Station, Nelder developed and supervised the updating of the statistical software packages GLIM and GenStat: Both packages are flexible high-level programming languages that allow statisticians to formulate linear models concisely. GLIM influenced later environments for statistical computing such as S-PLUS and R. Both GLIM and GenStat have powerful facilities for the analysis of variance for block experiments, an area where Nelder has made many contributions.
In statistical theory, Nelder and Wedderburn proposed the generalized linear model. Generalized linear models were formulated by John Nelder and Robert Wedderburn as a way of unifying various other statistical models, including linear regression, logistic regression and Poisson regression.[1] They proposed an iteratively reweighted least squares method for maximum likelihood estimation of the model parameters.
In statistical inference, Nelder (along with George Barnard and A. W. F. Edwards) has emphasized the importance of the likelihood in data analysis, promoting this "likelihood approach" as an alternative to frequentist and Bayesian statistics.
In response-surface optimization, Nelder and Roger Mead proposed the Nelder-Mead simplex heuristic, which is often 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 National Vegetable Research Station, Wellesbourne from 1951 to 1968 and Head of the Statistics Department at Rothamsted Experimental Station from 1968 to 1984. 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.
Nelder was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976[2] and received the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in gold in 2005.
Nelder was responsible, with Max Nicholson and James Ferguson-Lees, for debunking the Hastings Rarities - a series of rare birds, preserved by a taxidermist and provided with bogus histories.[3]
Nelder died on 7 August 2010 in Luton and Dunstable Hospital, where he was recovering from a fall.[4]
80th birthday tribute
- Methods and Models in Statistics: In Honour of Professor John Nelder, FRS edited by Niall Adams, Martin Crowder, David J Hand & Dave Stephens, Imperial College Press (2004). Imperial College Press Newsletter
Selected publications
- JN and R. W. M. Wedderburn, "Generalized Linear Models", J. R. Statist. Soc. A, 135 (1972) 370-384.
- McCullagh, P. and J.A. Nelder. 1989. Generalized Linear Models. 2nd ed. Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, Florida. ISBN 0-412-31760-5
- Lee, Y., J.A. Nelder, and Y. Pawitan. 2006. Generalized Linear Models with Random Effects: Unified Analysis via H-likelihood. Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, Florida. ISBN 1-58488-631-5
References
- ^ Nelder, John; Wedderburn, Robert (1972). "Generalized Linear Models". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General) 135 (3): 370–384. doi:10.2307/2344614. JSTOR 2344614.
- ^ Royal Society citation
- ^ Nelder, J.A. (1962). A statistical examination of the Hastings Rarities. British Birds, August 1962.
- ^ Payne, Roger. "John Ashworth Nelder". VSN International. http://www.vsni.co.uk/featured/john-nelder/. Retrieved 16 August 2010.
External links
| Academic offices | ||
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| Preceded by Walter Bodmer | President of the Royal Statistical Society 1985—1986 | Succeeded by James Durbin |
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| Name | Nelder, John |
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| Short description | |
| Date of birth | 8 October 1924 |
| Place of birth | Brushford,near Dulverton, Somerset, England |
| Date of death | 7 August 2010 |
| Place of death | Luton, Bedfordshire, England |
Categories: Fellows of the Royal Society | Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society | Winners of the Guy Medal in Gold | Winners of the Guy Medal in Silver | Rothamsted statisticians | English statisticians | British statisticians | Academics of Imperial College London | British mathematicians | 20th-century mathematicians | Alumni of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge | Old Blundellians | People from Dulverton | 1924 births | 2010 deaths
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