R. A. Fisher in the 21st Century

Fisher is the single most important figure in 20th century statistics. This talk examines his influence on modern statistical thinking, trying to predict how Fisherian we can expect the 21st century to be. Fisher’s philosophy is characterized as a series of shrewd compromises between the Bayesian and frequentist viewpoints, augmented by some unique characteristics that are particularly useful in applied problems. Several current research topics are examined with an eye toward Fisherian influence, or the lack of it, and what this portends for future statistical developments. Based on the 1996 Fisher lecture, the article closely follows the text of that talk. Keywords and phrases: Statistical inference, Bayee, frequentist, fiducial, empirical Bayes, model selection, bootstrap, confidence intervals.