John Nelder

John Ashworth Nelder FRS (born 8 October 1924) is a British statistician.

Born in Dulverton, Somerset, he was educated at Blundell's School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics.

Nelder's appointments include Head, Statistics Section, National Vegetable Research Station, Wellesbourne 1951-1968; Head, first Statistics Department then Biomathematics Division, Rothamsted Experimental Station 1968-1984; Visiting Professor, Imperial College London 1972- present.

Nelder's work is enormously influential, as he is co-inventor of the generalized linear model. He is also a proponent of the likelihood school of inference, an alternative to both the frequentist and Bayesian schools. He received the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in gold in 2005.

He was responsible, with Max Nicholson and James Ferguson-Lees, for debunking the Hastings Rarities - as series of rare birds, preserved by a taxidermist and provided with bogus histories^[1].

References

1. ^ Nelder, J.A. (1962). A statistical examination of the Hastings Rarities. British Birds, August 1962.

• Peter McCullagh; John Nelder (1989). Generalized Linear Models, Second Edition. Chapman & Hall/CRC.  [1]
• Youngjo Lee; John Nelder and Yudi Pawitan (2006). Generalized Linear Models with Random Effects: Unified Analysis via H-likelihood. Chapman & Hall/CRC.  [2]

80th Birthday tribute

• Methods and Models in Statistics: In Honour of Professor John Nelder, FRS edited by Niall Adams, Martin Crowder, David J Hand & Dave Stephens Imperial College Press (2004). Imperial College Press Newsletter

See also

• Genstat
• Nelder-Mead method

External links

• John Nelder homepage
• A Conversation with John Nelder
• Royal Society citation
• Photographs