Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis, being the one to most comprehensively combine the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin. For his contributions to biology, Richard Dawkins proclaimed Fisher as "the greatest of Darwin’s successors". He is considered one of the founding fathers of Neo-Darwinism.
John Caius, also known as Johannes Caius and Ioannes Caius, was an English physician, and second founder of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
John Venn, FRS, FSA was an English mathematician, logician and philosopher noted for introducing Venn diagrams, which are used in logic, set theory, probability, statistics, and computer science. In 1866, Venn published The Logic of Chance, a groundbreaking book which espoused the frequency theory of probability, arguing that probability should be determined by how often something is forecast to occur as opposed to "educated" assumptions. Venn then further developed George Boole's theories in the 1881 work Symbolic Logic, where he highlighted what would become known as Venn diagrams.
Leonard Darwin was an English politician, economist and eugenicist. He was a son of the naturalist Charles Darwin, and also a mentor to Ronald Fisher, a statistician and evolutionary biologist.
The Punnett square is a square diagram that is used to predict the genotypes of a particular cross or breeding experiment. It is named after Reginald C. Punnett, who devised the approach in 1905. The diagram is used by biologists to determine the probability of an offspring having a particular genotype. The Punnett square is a tabular summary of possible combinations of maternal alleles with paternal alleles. These tables can be used to examine the genotypical outcome probabilities of the offspring of a single trait (allele), or when crossing multiple traits from the parents. The Punnett square is a visual representation of Mendelian inheritance. For multiple traits, using the "forked-line method" is typically much easier than the Punnett square. Phenotypes may be predicted with at least better-than-chance accuracy using a Punnett square, but the phenotype that may appear in the presence of a given genotype can in some instances be influenced by many other factors, as when polygenic inheritance and/or epigenetics are at work.
The Senate House is a 1720s building of the University of Cambridge in England, used formerly for meetings of its senate and now mainly for graduation ceremonies.
Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, FRS is a British statistician, geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He is the son of the surgeon Harold C. Edwards, and brother of medical geneticist John H. Edwards. He has sometimes been called "Fisher's Edwards" to distinguish him from his brother, because he was mentored by Ronald Fisher. Edwards has always had a high regard for Fisher's scientific contributions and has written extensively on them. To mark the Fisher centenary in 1990, Edwards proposed a commemorative Sir Ronald Fisher window be installed in the Dining Hall of Gonville & Caius College. When the window was removed in 2020, he vigorously opposed the move.
Alexander Frederick Richmond Wollaston was an English medical doctor, ornithologist, botanist, climber and explorer. After qualifying as a surgeon in 1903, Wollaston decided to spend his life on exploration and natural history, travelling extensively; he wrote books about his travels and work, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1907. He took up an offer from John Maynard Keynes as a tutor at Cambridge, Wollaston and was shot dead by Douglas Potts, a deranged undergraduate student, in Cambridge.
The Design of Experiments is a 1935 book by the English statistician Ronald Fisher about the design of experiments and is considered a foundational work in experimental design. Among other contributions, the book introduced the concept of the null hypothesis in the context of the lady tasting tea experiment. A chapter is devoted to the Latin square.
Gonville and Caius College, often referred to simply as Caius, is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1348 by Edmund Gonville, it is the fourth-oldest of the University of Cambridge's 31 colleges and one of the wealthiest. In 1557, it was refounded by alumnus John Caius. The college has been attended by many students who have gone on to significant accomplishment, including fifteen Nobel Prize winners, the second highest of any Oxbridge college.
Significance, established in 2004, is a bimonthly print and digital magazine published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) and the American Statistical Association (ASA). It publishes articles on topics of statistical interest presented at a level suited for a general audience. Articles are reviewed by an editorial board of statistics experts drawn from the three societies. The founding editor-in-chief was Helen Joyce. The current editor is Anna Britten. Significance replaced the RSS's journal, The Statistician. The magazine also has a website.
John SmithD.D. was a British academic and astronomer.
Robert Heath Lock was an English botanist and geneticist who wrote the first English textbook on genetics.
Sir John Ellys or Ellis (1634?–1716) was an English academic, Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge from 1703.
James Halman was an academic of the University of Cambridge. He held the office of Registrary of the university from 1683 to 1701 and was also the twenty-third Master of Gonville and Caius College.
Arthur James Ceely was an English soldier and cricketer.
Henry Crowe was an English parish priest and early animal rights writer.
The history of black people in Cambridge, UK cannot easily be separated from the history of Cambridge University. The university has attracted students from Africa and the African diaspora to the town of Cambridge for more than two centuries. Several notable black people had a Cambridge association in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and at the end of the eighteenth century Cambridge became a centre of abolitionist sentiment. From the end of the nineteenth century the university started to admit black students in larger numbers. In recent decades, however, the relatively low number of black students admitted to the university has become a topic of media comment and public concern.
