Ronald Aylmer Fisher was born in London on 17th February 1890. His father was a successful fine arts auctioneer and for most of Ron’s childhood the family lived very comfortably in Hampstead. Ron showed ability at an early age. He was particularly precocious in mathematics, though his biology teacher divided for “sheer brilliance” all those he had ever taught into Fisher and the rest. Fisher went up to Caius College Cambridge graduating in 1912 with a first in mathematics.
Fisher gave up being a mathematics teacher in 1919 when he was offered two posts simultaneously. Karl Pearson offered him the post of chief statistician at the Galton laboratories and he was also offered the post of statistician at the Rothamsted Agricultural Experiment Station. This was the oldest agricultural research institute in the United Kingdom, established in 1837 to study the effects of nutrition and soil types on plant fertility, and it appealed to Fisher’s interest in farming. He accepted the post at Rothamsted where he made many contributions both to statistics, in particular the design and analysis of experiments, and to genetics.There he studied the design of experiments by introducing the concept of randomisation and the analysis of variance, procedures now used throughout the world. Fisher’s idea was to arrange an experiment as a set of partitioned sub-experiments that differ from each other in having one or several factors or treatments applied to them. The sub-experiments were designed in such a way as to permit differences in their outcome to be attributed to the different factors or combinations of factors by means of statistical analysis. This was a notable advance over the existing approach of varying only one factor at a time in an experiment, which was a relatively inefficient procedure.
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