Fisher in Adelaide

Abstract

R. A. Fisher spent much of his final 3 years of life in Adelaide. It was a congenial place to live and work, and he was much in demand as a speaker, in Australia and overseas. It was, however, a difficult time for him because of the sustained criticism of fiducial inference from the early 1950s onwards. The article discusses some of Fisher's work on inference from an Adelaide perspective. It also considers some of the successes arising from this time, in the statistics of field experimentation and in evolutionary genetics. A few personal recollections of Fisher as houseguest are provided. This article is the text of a article presented on August 31, 2012 at the 26th International Biometric Conference, Kobe, Japan.