Frank Yates

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

He was born in Manchester. Yates was the eldest of five children, and the only boy, born to Edith and Percy Yates. His father was a seed merchant. He attended Wadham House, a private school, before gaining a scholarship to Clifton College in 1916. After four years there he obtained a scholarship at St John's College and four years later graduated with a First Class Honours degree.

He spent two years teaching mathematics to secondary school pupils 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. This marriage was dissolved in 1933 and he later married Pauline Penn, previously the partner of the well-known architect. 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' algorithm and the balanced incomplete block design.

During World War II he worked on what would later be called operational research.

After the war he worked on sample survey design and analysis. He became an enthusiast of electronic computers, in 1954 obtaining an Elliott 401 for Rothamsted and contributing to the initial development of statistical computing. In he was awarded the Guy Medal in Gold of the Royal Statistical Society, and in 1966 he was awarded the Royal Medal 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.

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Category:Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society Category:Winners of the Guy Medal in Gold Category:Rothamsted statisticians Category:English statisticians Category:Survey methodologists Category:20th-century mathematicians Category:Academics of Imperial College London Category:Operations researchers Category:Old Cliftonians Category:People from Manchester Category:1902 births Category:1994 deaths Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Royal Medal winners