Introduction to Fordisc 3 and Human Variation Statistics

Linear discriminant functions were developed by Fisher and apparently first used by Barnard (1935) and formally published by Fisher (1936). A related statistic, also important in Fordisc, is the generalized distance, developed by Mahalanobis (1936). Although the statistical methods were in place by early to mid-twentieth century, they were little used, because they were computationally burdensome with the hand calculators of the time.