Evelyn Fix

Evelyn Fix was an American statistician, born in Duluth, Minnesota, on January 27, 1904, who died on December 30, 1965. She earned an A.B. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1924, then an M.S. in education and a period as a high school teacher, followed by an M.A. in mathematics in 1933 and a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1948. She joined the Berkeley statistics faculty, became an assistant professor in 1951 and a full professor of statistics in 1963. In 1951 she and Joseph Hodges, Jr. published the paper on discriminatory analysis and nonparametric discrimination that defined the nearest neighbor rule, an important method that became a key piece of machine learning technology as the k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) algorithm. She was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.