Robert Fairthorne

Robert A. Fairthorne was born July 1st, 1904, in Abingdon-on-Thames, England, and died in 2000. He was an English mathematician and information science theorist." He 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.

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.

Awards

Award of Merit, Association for Information Science and Technology, 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.