Skip to content

 

Fellows Directory

Anthony Edwards

Anthony Edwards

Credit: No restriction

Professor Anthony Edwards FRS

Fellow


Elected: 2015

Biography

Professor Anthony Edwards (A.W.F.Edwards) was born in London on 4 October 1935. The younger brother of John Hilton Edwards FRS, he followed him to Uppingham School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge.  Whereas John read medicine, Anthony read natural sciences, specialising in genetics under R.A.Fisher FRS, for his third year, and proceeding to a PhD in the department after Fisher retired in 1957.

After one postdoctoral year he was invited by Professor L.L.Cavalli-Sforza to the University of Pavia, where, in 1961-1964, they initiated the statistical approach to the construction of evolutionary trees from genetical data, using the first modern computers. A year at Stanford was followed by three years as Senior Lecturer in Statistics at the University of Aberdeen under Professor D.J.Finney FRS and then two years as a Bye-Fellow in Science at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, during which he wrote his book Likelihood.

The remainder of Professor Edwards’s career has been spent at Cambridge, ultimately as Professor of Biometry, during which he has published widely, including books on Venn Diagrams, Mathematical Genetics, and Pascal’s Triangle.

Professional positions

Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge
Emeritus Professor of Biometry, University of Cambridge

Interest and expertise

Subject groups

  • Organismal biology, evolution and ecology
    • Population genetics

Keywords

Likelihood, Venn diagrams, Phylogenetic trees, Population genetics, Statistical inference, Fundamental theorem of natural selection, Pascal, James Bernoulli, Mendel, R.A.Fisher

Was this page useful?
Thank you for your feedback
Thank you for your feedback. Please help us improve this page by taking our short survey.