Evelyn Fix (January 27, 1904 – December 30, 1965) was a

statistician A statistician is a person who works with Theory, theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private sector, private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, a ...

. She was born in Duluth, Minnesota and earned her A.B. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1924. One year later she earned an M.S. in education and became a high school teacher. She earned an M.A. in mathematics, also from the University of Minnesota in 1933. She obtained a Ph.D. in 1948 at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, and joined the statistics faculty there. She was appointed as an assistant professor in 1951 and in 1963 she was promoted to professor of statistics. She died of a heart attack on December 30, 1965. During World War II, Fix worked as a research assistant in the Mathematics Department at the University of California, Berkeley on projects conducted as part of work conducted for the "Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Committee." Fix was one of two women who were the first assistant professors hired by the statistics group within the Mathematics Department in 1951. Statistics became a separate department in 1955. In 1951 Fix and Joseph Hodges, Jr. published their groundbreaking paper "Discriminatory Analysis. Nonparametric Discrimination: Consistency Properties," which defined the nearest neighbor rule, an important method that would go on to become a key piece of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

technologies, the k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) algorithm. She was a Fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts ...

Personal life

In her latter years, Fix was the life partner of famous English statistician F.N. David who worked at the same department. They lived together in

Kensington Kensington is an area of London in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, around west of Central London. The district's commercial heart is Kensington High Street, running on an east–west axis. The north-east is taken up by Kensingt ...

outside Berkeley.

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Fix, Evelyn 1904 births 1965 deaths People from Duluth, Minnesota University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts alumni American statisticians American women statisticians University of California, Berkeley alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty 20th-century American mathematicians American LGBTQ academics Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics 20th-century American women mathematicians 20th-century American LGBTQ people