Frank Yates

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Frank Yates (May 12, 1902 - June 17, 1994) was one of the pioneers of 20th century statistics. He was born in Manchester.

Yates was the eldest of five children, and the only boy, born to Edith and Percy Yates. His father was a seed merchant. He attended a private school Wadham House, before obtaining a scholarship to attend Clifton College in 1916. After four years at Clifton he obtained a Cambridge University scholarship to study at St John's College and four years later graduated with a First Class Honours degree.

He spent two years teaching mathematics to secondary school pupils before heading to Africa where he was mathematical advisor on the Gold Coast Survey. He returned to England due to ill health and met and married a chemist, Margaret Forsythe Marsden, the daughter of a civil servant. This marriage was dissolved in 1933 and he later married Pauline Penn, previously the partner of the well-known architect. After Pauline's death in 1976 he married Ruth Hunt, his long-time secretary.

In 1931 he was appointed assistant statistician at Rothamsted Experimental Station by R.A. Fisher. In 1933 he became head of statistics when Fisher obtained a position at University College London. At Rothamsted he worked on the design of experiments, including contributions to the theory of analysis of variance and originating Yates' algorithm and the balanced incomplete block design.

During World War II he worked on what would later be called operational research.

After the war he worked on sample survey design and analysis. He became an enthusiast of electronic computers, in 1954 obtaining an Elliott 401 for Rothamsted and contributing to the initial development of statistical computing. In he was awarded the Guy Medal in Gold of the Royal Statistical Society, and in 1966 he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society. He retired from Rothamsted in 2000 came a Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London.

Publications included:

The design and analysis of factorial experiments, Technical Communication no. 35 of the Commonwealth Bureau of Soils (1937) (alternatively attributed to the Imperial Bureau of Soil Science).
Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research (1938, coauthor R.A. Fisher) sixth edition
Sampling methods for censuses and surveys (1949)
Computer programs GENFAC, RGSP, Fitquan.

He died in 1994, aged 92, in Harpenden.