| John Ashworth Nelder | |
|---|---|
| Born | 8 October 1924 Brushford, Somerset, England |
| Died | 7 August 2010 (aged 85) Luton, Bedfordshire, England |
| Residence | United Kingdom |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom |
| Fields | Statistics |
| Institutions | National Vegetable Research Station Rothamsted Experimental Station Imperial College London |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Known for | Generalized linear models, analysis of complex experimental designs, GLIM, GenStat |
| Notable awards | Fellow of the Royal Society (1976) Guy Medal in Gold (2005) |
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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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.
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]
| 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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