Frank Yates

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Born: 12 May 1902 in Manchester, England
Died: 17 June 1994 in Harpenden, England

 

Frank Yates was educated at Wadham House, a private school where the mathematics master was an excellent mathematician and teacher who influenced Frank into this direction. He obtained a scholarship to Clifton College in 1916. Four years later he was awarded a scholarship to study at St John's College Cambridge. He graduated with First Class Honours in 1924 after doing very well at university but never looking like the outstanding scholar that he was to become.

After two years teaching mathematics he decided to leave teaching and joined the Gold Coast Survey as mathematical advisor. Because of ill health he decided to try for a post in England and, after applying to R A Fisher, he was appointed assistant statistician at Rothamsted Experimental Station in 1931.

When Fisher was appointed to a chair in University College London in 1933, Yates became Head of Statistics at Rothamsted. He held this post until he retired in 1968.

Yates worked on experimental design, often collaborating with Fisher. During World War II he studied food supplies and application of fertilisers to improve crops. He applied his experimental design techniques to a wide range of problems such as control of pests. After 1945 he was to continue to apply his statistical techniques to problems of human nutrition.

Yates was appointed to the United Nations Commission on Statistical Sampling and published Sampling Methods for Censuses and Surveys in 1949. He was an enthusiastic user of computers writing:-

... to be a good theoretical statistician one must also compute, and must therefore have the best computing aids.

He was one of the people who were influential in establishing the British Computer Society, and he was president of the Society in 1960-61.

Yates was an extremely good Departmental Head. In the address at his memorial service this was his style in this role was talked about:-

Frank Yates's method of managing his department was a remarkable one, in that it was totally invisible. There were almost no rules, apart from that which insisted that no scientific paper left the department without being read, and usually greatly improved, by him.

After he retired, he became Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College, London. There he did some lecturing for the first time in his career, without having a great deal of success. In [2] his lecturing is described as follows:-

He was not an ideal lecturer, for he lacked concern for comprehensive formal presentation and preferred to talk about general ideas.

The Royal Society of London awarded him their Royal Medal in 1966 in:-

... recognition of his profound and far-reaching contributions to the statistical methods of experimental biology.