Evelyn Fix

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, 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. [1]

Evelyn Fix
Born(1904-01-27)January 27, 1904
Duluth, Minnesota, United States
DiedDecember 30, 1965(1965-12-30) (aged 61)
California, United States
Alma materUniversity of Minnesota
University of California, Berkeley
Known forK-nearest neighbors algorithm
Fix–Neyman model
Scientific career
FieldsStatistics
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisorJerzy Neyman

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.[2] 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 technologies, the k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) algorithm.[3]

She was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.[4]

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.[5]

References
  1. "Evelyn Fix | Department of Statistics".
  2. Moore, Calvin C. (2007). Mathematics at Berkeley: A History. AK Peters. pp. 151. ISBN 9781568813028.
  3. Fix, Evelyn; Hodges, Joseph L. (1951). Discriminatory Analysis. Nonparametric Discrimination: Consistency Properties (Report). USAF School of Aviation Medicine, Randolph Field, Texas.
  4. Honored Fellows, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, archived from the original on 2014-03-02, retrieved 2017-11-24
  5. Neyman, Jerzy. "Evelyn Fix, Statistics: Berkeley". In Memoriam. University of California, Berkeley, Department of Statistics.
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