John Ashworth Nelder (8 October 1924 – 7 August 2010) was a British statistician known for his contributions to experimental design, analysis of variance, computational statistics, and statistical theory.

Contributions

Nelder's work was influential in statistics. While leading research at Rothamsted Experimental Station, Nelder developed and supervised the updating of the

statistical software Statistical software are specialized computer programs for analysis in statistics and econometrics. Open-source * ADaMSoft – a generalized statistical software with data mining algorithms and methods for data management * ADMB – a software ...

packages

GLIM Glim or Gleam ( arz, جليم) is a neighborhood in Alexandria, Egypt. See also * Neighborhoods in Alexandria Alexandria, Virginia, an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia, is located along the western bank of the Potomac Ri ...

and GenStat: Both packages are flexible high-level programming languages that allow statisticians to formulate

linear models In statistics, the term linear model is used in different ways according to the context. The most common occurrence is in connection with regression models and the term is often taken as synonymous with linear regression model. However, the ter ...

concisely. GLIM influenced later environments for

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 ...

such as S-PLUS and R. Both GLIM and GenStat have powerful facilities for the analysis of variance for block experiments, an area where Nelder made many contributions. In statistical theory, Nelder and Wedderburn proposed the

generalized linear model In statistics, a generalized linear model (GLM) is a flexible generalization of ordinary linear regression. The GLM generalizes linear regression by allowing the linear model to be related to the response variable via a ''link function'' and b ...

. Generalized linear models were formulated by John Nelder and Robert Wedderburn as a way of unifying various other statistical models, including

linear regression In statistics, linear regression is a linear approach for modelling the relationship between a scalar response and one or more explanatory variables (also known as dependent and independent variables). The case of one explanatory variable is call ...

, logistic regression and Poisson regression. They proposed an iteratively reweighted least squares method for maximum likelihood estimation of the model parameters. In

statistical inference Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying probability distribution, distribution of probability.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical ...

, Nelder (along with George Barnard and A. W. F. Edwards) emphasized the importance of the likelihood in

data analysis Data analysis is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Data analysis has multiple facets and approaches, enco ...

, promoting this "likelihood approach" as an alternative to frequentist and Bayesian statistics. In response-surface optimization, Nelder and

Roger Mead Roger Mead (1938 – 10 August 2015) was an English statistician and Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics at the University of Reading. He is known for his paper with John Nelder on the widely-used Nelder–Mead method and for his work on stat ...

proposed the Nelder–Mead method ">Nelder–Mead simplex heuristic, widely used in engineering and statistics.

Biography

Born in Brushford, near Dulverton">Brushford, Somerset">Brushford, near Dulverton, Somerset, Nelder was educated at Blundell's School">Dulverton.html" ;"title="Brushford, Somerset">Brushford, near Dulverton">Brushford, Somerset">Brushford, near Dulverton, Somerset, Nelder was educated at Blundell's School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he read Mathematics. Nelder's appointments included Head of the Statistics Section at the Horticulture Research International, National Vegetable Research Station, Wellesbourne, from 1951 to 1968 and head of the Statistics Department at Rothamsted Experimental Station from 1968 to 1984. During his time at Wellesbourne he spent a year (1965–1966) at the Waite Institute in Adelaide, South Australia, where he worked with Graham Wilkinson on Genstat. He held an appointment as Visiting Professor at Imperial College London from 1972 onwards. He was responsible, with Max Nicholson and

James Ferguson-Lees Ian James Ferguson-Lees (8 January 1929 in Italy – 11 January 2017) was a British ornithologist. He became known as a member of the British Birds Rarities Committee who was responsible, with John Nelder and Max Nicholson, for publicly debunking t ...

, for debunking the

Hastings Rarities The Hastings Rarities affair is a case of statistically demonstrated ornithological fraud that misled the bird world for decades in the 20th century. The discovery of the long-running hoax shocked ornithologists. The Hastings Rarities were a se ...

– sightings of a series of rare birds, preserved by a taxidermist and provided with bogus histories.Nelder, J.A. (1962). A statistical examination of the Hastings Rarities. '' British Birds'', August 1962. Nelder died on 7 August 2010 in

Luton and Dunstable Hospital Luton and Dunstable University Hospital is an acute hospital in Luton, Bedfordshire, England, run by Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It provides medical and surgical services for over 350,000 people in southern Bedfordshire, the nort ...

, taken there after a fall at home, which was incidental to the cause of death.

Awards and distinctions

Nelder was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976 and received the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in Gold in 2005. He was also the recipient of the inaugural Karl Pearson Prize of the

International Statistical Institute The International Statistical Institute (ISI) is a professional association of statisticians. It was founded in 1885, although there had been international statistical congresses since 1853. The institute has about 4,000 elected members from gov ...

, with

Peter McCullagh Peter McCullagh (born 8 January 1952) is a Northern Irish-born American statistician and John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. Education McCullagh is from Plumbridge ...

, "for their monograph Generalized Linear Models (1983)". As tribute on his eightieth birthday, a festschrift ''Methods and Models in Statistics: In Honour of Professor John Nelder, FRS'' was edited by Niall Adams, Martin Crowder, David J Hand & Dave Stephens, Imperial College Press (2004). The first annual John Nelder memorial lecture was held at Imperial College London, on 8 March 2012, as part of the Mathematics department Colloquium series. The lecture was given by John's long term co-author, Prof

. An interviewhttp://stats.ma.ic.ac.uk/~nadams/podcast/podcast6.mp3 with Peter McCullagh, about statistical modelling, includes some reminiscences about John.

Selected publications

* JN and R. W. M. Wedderburn, "Generalized Linear Models", ''J. R. Statist. Soc.'' A, 135 (1972) 370–384. * McCullagh, P. and J.A. Nelder. 1989. ''Generalized Linear Models''. 2nd ed. Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, Florida. *Lee, Y., J.A. Nelder, and Y. Pawitan. 2006. ''Generalized Linear Models with Random Effects: Unified Analysis via H-likelihood''. Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, Florida.

References

External links

A Conversation with John Nelder

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nelder, John Fellows of the Royal Society Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society Rothamsted statisticians English statisticians Academics of Imperial College London 20th-century British mathematicians 21st-century British mathematicians Alumni of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge People educated at Blundell's School People from Dulverton 1924 births 2010 deaths Rothamsted Experimental Station people