Sir Harold Jeffreys, 2 April 1891 - 18 March 1989

Harold Jeffreys’ Theory of Probability revisited

Published nearly seventy years ago, Jeffreys’ Theory of Probability (1939) has had a unique impact on the Bayesian community and is now considered to be one of the main classics in Bayesian Statistics as well as the initiator of the objective Bayes school. In particular, its advances on the derivation of noninformative priors as well as on the scaling of Bayes factors have had a lasting impact ...

The Statistical Education of Harold Jeffreys

The paper considers the statistical work of the physicist Harold Jeffreys. In 1933–4 Jeffreys had a controversy with R.A. Fisher, the leading statistician of the time. Prior to the encounter, Jeffreys had worked on probability as the basis for scientific inference and had used methods from the theory of errors in astronomy and seismology. He had also started to rework the theory of errors on th...

Sir Harold Ridley's vision.

This valediction to the late Sir Harold Ridley commemorates the 50th year of his first publication in the St Thomas’s Hospital Report, describing his pioneer undertaking to research, design, and implant an intraocular lens to correct aphakia. Dissatisfied with the poor acuity and loss of binocular single vision following unilateral cataract extraction and the poor outcome, particularly in child...

On the Documentation and Excavation Season 18 March - 18 April 2003

The Eureka Moment: An Interview with Sir Alec Jeffreys

In 1984, while tracking the veins of globin gene evolution and panning the human genome for hypervariable linkage markers, Sir Alec Jeffreys accidentally struck gold—he discovered a way to identify any human being by a DNA ‘‘fingerprint’’. To use Jeffreys’ words, he has been ‘‘branded’’ by DNA fingerprinting, but he delights in its application and the hook it provides for public curiosity about...