D. J. Finney facts for kids
David John Finney (born January 3, 1917 – died November 12, 2018) was a smart British scientist. He was a statistician, which means he used math and data to understand things. He taught statistics at the University of Edinburgh.
Finney led the Agricultural Research Council's Unit of Statistics for many years. He also helped start important ways to check if medicines were safe. He lived to be 101 years old!
Early Life and School
David Finney was born in Latchford, Cheshire, near Warrington, England. His family was not rich, but they always had what they needed. His grandfather was a teacher, and his father worked as an accountant. David was the oldest child in his family.
He went to Lymm Grammar School and then Manchester Grammar School. At Manchester Grammar, he won a special scholarship to go to Clare College, Cambridge. From 1934 to 1938, he studied math and statistics there.
After Cambridge, he earned another scholarship. He went to University College London to study how statistics could be used in farming. He worked with a famous scientist named Ronald Fisher.
Working Life
In 1939, Finney started working at Rothamsted Experimental Station. This place focused on making farming better. David helped design experiments on farms and understand their results.
In 1945, he moved to the University of Oxford. He became the first person to teach about designing and analyzing science experiments there.
In 1950, he got married. In 1952, he, his wife, and their baby daughter moved to New Delhi, India. For a year, he worked as a consultant for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. He helped develop the Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute. In 1951, he became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He also became a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1955.
After returning from India, Finney went to the University of Aberdeen. There, he set up a special unit for statistics. This unit helped Scottish farmers, just like Rothamsted helped farmers in England.
In 1966, the statistics unit moved to the University of Edinburgh. Finney moved with it and became the first Professor of Statistics at the university. He was also the Director of the Unit of Statistics. He was the president of the Royal Statistical Society from 1973 to 1974. He retired from his job in Edinburgh in 1984.
During the 1960s, Finney started working on drug safety. He gave important advice to the UK system for checking medicine safety. He also helped the WHO create a system to track medicine side effects around the world. In 2002, he worked with the Uppsala Monitoring Centre. They published a collection of his writings about statistics and drug safety. He also helped set up the Drug Safety Research Unit.
Finney received an honorary degree from Heriot-Watt University in 1981. In the same year, he became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.
Books He Wrote
- Probit Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 1947
- Statistical methods in biological assay, Hafner, 1952; Griffin, 1971, ISBN: 978-0-85264-014-2
- Experimental design and its statistical basis, University of Chicago Press, 1955
- Statistics for mathematicians: an introduction, Oliver & Boyd, 1968
