Robert Fairthorne

Robert A. Fairthorne (1904 - 2000) was an English mathematician and information science theorist.

Life

Robert A. Fairthorne was born on July 1, 1904, in Abingdon-on-Thames, England. He earned a degree in mathematics with first class honors from London University and worked as a mathematician at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, England from 1927 to 1963. He remained active as a consultant, professor, and author in the USA and the UK. He died in 2000.

Contributions

Fairthorne's principal contribution was his rigorous and penetrating critiques of concepts and theories in information science.

Other interests included making experimental films of mathematical functions and stereo photography.

Publications

Schultz, Wallace L. & Claire K. Schultz. “Bibliography of the Writings of Robert A. Fairthorne in the Field of Information Science," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 22, no 3 (May 1971): 164–65. DOI: 10.1002/asi.4630220304.

Sixteen of Fairthorne's papers are reprinted in Fairthorne, R. A. Towards Information Retrieval. London: Butterworths, 1961.

• "Empirical Hyperbolic Distributions (Bradford‐Zipf‐Mandelbrot) for Bibliometric Description and Prediction." Journal of Documentation Journal of Documentation 25 (December 1969): 319-43.
• "Morphology of information flow." Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery.14, no. 4 (Oct. 1967): 710-719.

Awards

• American Documentation Institute. Award of Merit, 1967.

Further reading

• Schultz, Wallace L. & Claire K. Schultz. “Robert A. Fairthorne, a Biographical Sketch.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 22, no 3 (May 1971): 161–65. DOI: 10.1002/asi.4630220304.
• Brookes, B.C. "Robert Fairthorne and the Scope of Information Science." Journal of Documentation 30, no. 2 (1974): 139-152.
• Rousseau, R. "Robert Fairthorne and the empirical power laws." Journal of Documentation 61, no 2 (April 2005):194-202. DOI:10.1108/00220410510585188
• Vickery, Brian. "Robert Fairthorne, 1904-2000." Journal of Documentation 56, no 6 (Nov 2000): 601-4.