F. R. Farmer

Accomplishments

• He considered the public acceptability of risk,, arguing that a whole spectrum of events needs to be considered - not just the Maximum Credible Accident, but also those of less consequence but which were much more probable.
• He used examples such as hill walking to define a spectrum of risks which people found acceptable.
• He embodied this in a variation of with, which is usually called the Farmer Curve.
• Farmer postulated a near-inverse variation as acceptable - thus events which have twice the consequence must be approximately half as frequent, or less. The Farmer Curve is usually plotted as a straight line in log-log co-ordinates.