Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS[3] (17 February 1890– 29 July 1962) was a British statistician and geneticist. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science"[4] and   "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics".[5] In genetics, his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Fisher has been called "the greatest of Darwin’s successors".[6]