Frank Yates FRS (12 May 1902 – 17 June 1994) was one of the pioneers of 20th-century

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

Biography

Yates was born in Manchester, England, the eldest of five children (and only son) of seed merchant Percy Yates and his wife Edith. He attended Wadham House, a private school, before gaining a scholarship to Clifton College in 1916. In 1920 he obtained a scholarship at

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch Lady Margaret Beaufort. In constitutional terms, the college is a charitable corpo ...

, and four years later graduated with a First Class Honours degree. He spent two years teaching

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

to secondary school pupils at

Malvern College Malvern College is an Independent school (United Kingdom), independent coeducational day and boarding school in Malvern, Worcestershire, Malvern, Worcestershire, England. It is a public school (United Kingdom), public school in the British sen ...

before heading to Africa where he was mathematical advisor on the Gold Coast Survey. He returned to England due to ill health and met and married a chemist, Margaret Forsythe Marsden, the daughter of a

civil servant The civil service is a collective term for a sector of government composed mainly of career civil servants hired on professional merit rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leaders ...

. This marriage was dissolved in 1933 and he later married Prascovie (Pauline) Tchitchkine, previously the partner of Alexis Tchitchkine. After her death in 1976, he married Ruth Hunt, his long-time secretary. In 1931 Yates was appointed assistant statistician at Rothamsted Experimental Station by R.A. Fisher. In 1933 he became head of statistics when Fisher went to University College London. At Rothamsted he worked on the design of experiments, including contributions to the theory of analysis of variance and originating Yates's algorithm and the balanced incomplete

block design In combinatorial mathematics, a block design is an incidence structure consisting of a set together with a family of subsets known as ''blocks'', chosen such that frequency of the elements satisfies certain conditions making the collection of bl ...

. During World War II he worked on what would later be called operations research. After WWII, he worked on sample survey design and analysis. He became an enthusiast of electronic

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

s, in 1954 obtaining an

Elliott 401 Elliott Brothers (London) Ltd was an early computer company of the 1950s–60s in the United Kingdom. It traced its descent from a firm of instrument makers founded by William Elliott (1780 or 1781-1853) in London around 1804. The research l ...

for Rothamsted and contributing to the initial development of

statistical computing Computational statistics, or statistical computing, is the bond between statistics and computer science. It means statistical methods that are enabled by using computational methods. It is the area of computational science (or scientific computin ...

. During 1960–61, he was President of the

British Computer Society Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

, succeeding the founding president and computer pioneer,

Maurice Wilkes Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes (26 June 1913 – 29 November 2010) was a British computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored program computers, and who inv ...

. In 1960, he was awarded the Guy Medal in Gold of the Royal Statistical Society and, in 1966, he was awarded the

Royal Medal The Royal Medal, also known as The Queen's Medal and The King's Medal (depending on the gender of the monarch at the time of the award), is a silver-gilt medal, of which three are awarded each year by the Royal Society, two for "the most important ...

of the Royal Society. He retired from Rothamsted to become a senior research fellow at Imperial College London. He died in 1994, aged 92, in

Harpenden Harpenden () is a town and civil parish in the City and District of St Albans in the county of Hertfordshire, England. The population of the built-up area was 30,240 in the 2011 census, whilst the population of the civil parish was 29,448. Har ...

Selected publications

*''The design and analysis of factorial experiments'', Technical Communication no. 35 of the Commonwealth Bureau of Soils (1937) (alternatively attributed to the Imperial Bureau of Soil Science). *''Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research'' (1938, coauthor R.A. Fisher)
sixth edition, 1963
*''Sampling methods for censuses and surveys'' (1949) * Computer programs GENFAC, RGSP, Fitquan.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yates, Frank 1902 births 1994 deaths People educated at Clifton College Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge English statisticians Survey methodologists 20th-century English mathematicians Academics of Imperial College London British operations researchers Scientists from Manchester Fellows of the Royal Society Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society Presidents of the British Computer Society Royal Medal winners

Biography

Selected publications

See also

References