Professor Cedric B. Smith, pioneer in statistical genetics: Died January 10, 2002, at the age of 84
✍ Scribed by Newton E. Morton
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2002
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 19 KB
- Volume
- 22
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0741-0395
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Born during the Great War, Cedric Austen Bardell Smith was committed to Quaker pacifism, mathematics, and statistical genetics. As a Cambridge undergraduate, he was one of the four members of the Trinity Mathematical Society, which attacked arcane questions. They solved the problem called "Squaring the Square," demonstrating that a square is composed of smaller squares, all of different sizes, and applied this to electrical networks with varying resistance.
He wrote amusing stories, poems, and songs, usually about mathematics or mathematicians, under the pen name Blanche Descartes. An attempt, much later by a graduate student, to contact the distinguished lady herself uncovered two facts: The inquiry received a prompt reply in French, with a London postmark; and Smith's full name anagrams to "U.R. Blanche Descartes, Limit'd." This quirky humor lasted throughout Smith's life, but never so light-heartedly as in his undergraduate years.
As a conscientious objector, he spent the Second World War as a porter in a hospital. From 1946 until his retirement, he worked at the Galton Laboratory, University of London, where he became Weldon Professor of Biometry. His early work with J.B.S. Haldane applied the likelihood approach to human linkage, which he extended in highly original papers for the next half-century. Among Smith's achievements is the most powerful test for mimic loci, which produce what appears to be the same disease but are located in different chromosome regions and act in different ways. With James Renwick, he pioneered sex-specific analysis based on the observation that chromosomes recombine at different points in male and female meiosis. Smith's