David Kerridge talk about Fisher and Deming and others

Dear Hanching Chung

>
>I found a letter between Fisher and perhaps Deming but inside the file

seems
>without Deming's name,

Thanks for the message, and for the references to Fisher on line.

The most likely explanation I can think of is that R A Fisher sent a
copy of the letter to Deming as well, knowing he would be interested.

Another possibility is that Deming helped with checking the mathematics
referred to in the letter.

As I expect you know, Deming spent some time at Rothamstead with Fisher,
and is one of the very few people that Fisher acknowledges in the
foreword to "Statistical Methods for Research Workers". He says that
Deming helped with the calculation of some of the statistical tables in
that book.

It is hard to imagine two such strong personalities working together,
but clearly they did.

I don't know which editions carry Fisher's acknowledgement, but the date
of that letter sounds near to the time when Deming had been there.

I never met R A Fisher myself, but I knew a lot of statisticians who had
worked with him. One of my senior lecturers had done his PhD in
mathematical genetics with Fisher as supervisor.

Fisher had a remarkable way with algebra - he often did it in his head,
by turning it into a problem in n - dimensional Euclidean geometry.

Keen though I was on geometry as a student, I never got to grips with n-
dimensional geometry. It's a bit late to start now.

David

--------the second letter

Dear Hanching Chung

>The book mentioned about George Barnard and yesterday I knew he died in
> 2002 and first time saw his portrait.

Yes, I knew George Barnard. He was our external examiner for statistics
when I was at Sheffield University, and I often saw him at meetings in
London.

>In 2008 I read a draft d a paper by Deming with a reference to Fisher's
>Statistical Inference book but later Deming decide to drop it for
unknown
>reason. (I knew many statisticians prefer Fisher not to write the
book,)

Fisher was a remarkable man, but nobody could argue with him. I expect
Deming did not want to give the impression that he approved of Fisher's
theory of inference. Fisher recognised the weakness of inference based
on repeated sampling from the same population - something that is rarely
possible in practice, and equally rarely relevant to the problems of
science. But Fisher's solution was to refer to sampling from a
"hypothetical infinite population." This idea seems too indefinite for
science, since it is not subject to operational definition. But only
Shewhart saw his way through this.

I think that the problem was that Fisher began as a mathematician, and
then became a scientist. That's the wrong way round. Deming and Shewhart
were scientists who became statisticians.

For many mathematicians their abstract models are more real than the
real world itself.

>Yesterday I suggested David Hsu here to write System of Profound
Knowledge
>for Beginners, He asked me advice for his two years book project here,

At a research meeting in New York, Deming sid to me:

"We are all beginners here."