The Revolutionary Paper, 1922

Abstract

During the period 1912–1921 Fisher had, at least for himself, developed new concepts of fundamental importance for the theory of estimation. He had rejected inverse probability as arbitrary and leading to noninvariant estimates; instead he grounded his own theory firmly on the frequency interpretation of probability. He had proposed to use invariance and the method of maximum likelihood estimation as basic concepts and had introduced the concept of sufficiency by an important example. Thus prepared, he was ready to publish a general theory of estimation, which he did in the paper [67], “On the Mathematical Foundations of Theoretical Statistics.” For the first time in the history of statistics a framework for a frequency-based general theory of parametric statistical inference was clearly formulated.