Evelyn Fix (January 27, 1904 – December 30, 1965) was a statistician. She was born in Duluth, Minnesota and earned her A.B. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1924. One year later she earned at M.S. in education and became a high school teacher. She earned an M.A. in mathematics, also from the University of Minnesota in 1933. She obtained a Ph.D. in 1948 at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, and joined the statistics faculty there. She was appointed as an assistant professor in 1951 and in 1963 she was promoted to professor of statistics. She died of a heart attack on December 30, 1965. During World War II, Fix worked as a research assistant in the Mathematics Department at the University of California, Berkeley on projects conducted as part of work conducted for the "Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Committee." Fix was one of two women who were the first assistant professors hired by the statistics group within the Mathematics Department in 1951. Statistics became a separate department in 1955. In 1951 Fix and Joseph Hodges, Jr. published their groundbreaking paper "Discriminatory Analysis. Nonparametric Discrimination: Consistency Properties," which defined the nearest neighbor rule, an important method that would go on to become a key piece of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

technologies, the k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) algorithm. She was a Fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...

Personal life

In her latter years, Fix was the life partner of famous English statistician F.N. David who worked at the same department. They lived together in Kensington outside Berkeley.

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Fix, Evelyn 1904 births 1965 deaths People from Duluth, Minnesota University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts alumni American statisticians Women statisticians University of California, Berkeley alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty 20th-century American mathematicians LGBT academics Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics 20th-century women mathematicians 20th-century LGBT people