Page 626 - Probability and Statistical Inference

14. Appendix 603

Savage, S. S. Wilks and J. Tukey. The article of Savage (1976), the volume
edited by Fienberg and Hinkley (1980), and the articles of Barnard (1992),
Karlin (1992), Rao (1992a) honoring Fisher’s centenary, deserve attention.
D. Basu’s article, Learning from Counterexamples: At the Indian Statisti-
cal Institute in the Early Fifties, about himself [Ghosh et al. (1992)] and the
interview article of Robbins [Page (1989)] mention interesting stories about
Fisher. Both (M. G.) Kendall (1963) and Neyman (1967) also gave much
historical perspectives.
Fisher travelled almost everywhere. At the request of P. C. Mahalanobis,
for example, he frequently visited the Indian Statistical Institute. Sometimes,
Fisher went to plead with the President as well as the Prime Minister of India
when Mahalanobis faced serious threat of cuts in Federal funding. Fisher
visited University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Iowa State University at
Ames a couple of times each. Many of these visits are colorfully portrayed in
his biography [Box (1978)].
Hinkley (1980b) opened with the sentence, “R. A. Fisher was without
question a genius.” In the published interview article [Folks (1995)], O.
Kempthorne mentioned giving a seminar at Ames with the title, “R. A. Fisher
= 1.4 of Gauss.” Fisher remained vigorously productive throughout his life.
He was always invigorating, totally engulfed in the creation of new ideas, and
forcefully challenging the status-quo in science and society.
He died peacefully on July 29, 1962 in Adelaide, South Australia. E. A.
Cornish, in his address [reprinted in Bennett (1990), pp. xvi-xviii] at Fisher’s
funeral on August 2, 1962 in Adelaide, had said, “He must go down in history
as one of the great men of this our twentieth century.” Nobody should ever
argue with this assertion.
A. N. Kolmogorov: Andrei Nikolaevitch Kolmogorov was born on April
25, 1903 during a journey to his mother’s home. His mother died during
childbirth. His father perished during the offensive by Dynikin in 1919. An
aunt brought up Kolmogorov in a village near Volga.
Kolmogorov went to Moscow University in 1920 to study mathematics.
In 1922, he constructed the first example of an integrable function whose
Fourier series diverged almost everywhere, and then gave the example of an
integrable function whose Fourier series diverged everywhere. He became an
instant international celebrity. Kolmogorov wrote his first paper, jointly with
Khinchine, which included the famous Three Series Theorem and Kolmogorov
Inequality.
Kolmogorov found a job as a secondary school teacher. He then became
a doctoral student under the supervision of N. N. Luzin. During this appren-
ticeship, one was normally required to complete fourteen different courses
in mathematics but one could substitute any final examination by submit-