Sir Ronald A. Fisher was a prominent mathematician who formalized and extended the field of statistics, and revolutionized the concept of experimental design. He worked for fourteen years as a research statistician and later held professorships in genetics, another field to which he made significant contributions. Fisher wrote some three hundred papers and seven books throughout his prodigious career.

The son of George Fisher, a partner in a fine arts auction firm, Ronald Aylmer Fisher was born in the north London suburb of East Finchley. The youngest of seven children, Fisher was a precocious child. In her biography, R. A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist, Fisher's daughter Joan Fisher Box describes an incident that occurred when the scientist was about three years old. Fisher engaged his nurse in a breakfast-table conversation about the successive halving of the number two; after she answered the first three questions of...