DaSSWeb | Will the Mendel-Fisher controversy ever end?

Speaker
Ana M. Pires
Department of Mathematics and CEMAT (IST, ULisboa)

Abstract
In 1866 Gregor Mendel published a seminal paper containing the  foundations of modern genetics. In 1936 Ronald Fisher published a  statistical analysis of Mendel’s data concluding that “the data of most,  if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree  closely with Mendel’s expectations.” The accusation gave rise to a controversy which reached the 21st century. We were fascinated by the  story and eventually did some research on it, which resulted in the publication of the paper “A Statistical Model to Explain the Mendel–Fisher Controversy” (A.M. Pires and J.A. Branco,  Statistical Science, 2010). Fourteen years later we revisit the story and try to understand how it has evolved and whether or not our ideas had any impact on that evolution.

Short Bio
Ana M. Pires studied Civil Engineering, Mathematics and Statistics at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, where she then worked for a number of years as Assistant (and later Associate) Professor of Statistics. She supervised several PhD students, participated in projects and authored a number of publications, strongly focused on applications and data, mainly in the areas of Robust and Computational Statistics. In 2013 she interrupted her academic career and moved to the UK where she worked as a researcher in Data Science and Machine Learning for the finance industry. She returned to Portugal in late 2023 and is now back to IST.

Link Zoom