What do leading statistician John Nelder and renowned filmmaker David Attenborough have in common?

Well, both gentlemen have a very keen interest in natural history. However, while the latter went on to become a household name in TV by fronting Zoo Quest, BBC’s breakthrough wildlife series, the former read mathematics (his best subject) and subsequently combined his interest in natural history and his forte through biometry.

Born in 1924 in England, Professor Nelder became head of the Statistics section of National Vegetable Research Station, Wellesbourne, after studying at Cambridge and Birmingham. His career in Statistics took a big turn in 1968, with the offer of the headship of the Statistics Department of the Rothamsted Experimental Station (now Rothamsted International). The department, said Prof Nelder, was outstanding in the UK for its combination of excellence in theoretical statistics, application to the analysis of experiments and surveys, and statistical computing.

Added the modest 80-year-old in an interview with ICP Newsletter, "I was most pleased, and not a little surprised, to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982. This represents the verdict of one's fellow scientists on the standard of one's work. I am pleased also to have served as President of both the Royal Statistical Society and the International Biometric Society."

There is certainly no cause for the "surprise" as Prof. Nelder, under the great influence of R A Fisher as well as Frank Yates and his school, has made very substantial contributions to various areas of statistics. These include optimisation (e.g., the Nelder Mead simplex algorithm), statistical computing (e.g., his contributions to GLIM and GENSTAT), statistical modelling (e.g., his seminal work on generalised linear models) and likelihood (e.g., his invention of hlikelihood).

Still, Prof Nelder would not attribute his achievements to any special trait or ability he possesses. "Perhaps I have some ability to see similarities between apparently distinct entities, which leads to useful generalisations," he quipped.

To mark the lifelong contribution of John Nelder’s, the Statistics Section of the Mathematics Department of Imperial College London organised a symposium to honour him on the occasion of his 80th Birthday in late March. Presentations at the symposium and reviews by leading researchers on some of Prof. Nelder’s contributions culminate in a unique and invaluable birthday volume entitled Methods and Models in Statistics: In Honour of Professor John Nelder, FRS.

Said the current Visiting Professor at Imperial College, "I naturally feel proud that my colleagues at Imperial College, led by Prof David Hand, thought that a celebration would be in order, and I am most grateful to them for the effort that they put into the organisation of the symposium. These events take much more work than many people recognise."

The word "retirement" is not on Prof Nelder’s radar yet. "I want to go on working because I am still having ideas. Eventually, no doubt, I shall retire properly but it hasn't happened yet," he enthused.

Had he not been an academician and researcher, Prof Nelder said he would have doubtlessly become a maker of natural history films. "Then I should have had to compete with David Attenborough, and would certainly have lost the contest for number one in that field."