Statisticians in stained glass houses

摘要

In 1989 the Fellows of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, decided to mark the centenary of the birth of one of our most famous sons, Sir Ronald Fisher, by erecting a stained glass window to him in the Hall. The design depicts the 7x7 Latin square from the dust jacket of his book The Design of Experiments. To complement the Fisher window we decided to place a Venn diagram in the window above. John Venn, like Fisher, was Caius through and through, starting as an undergraduate and ending as President. The overlap- ping sets of a Venn diagram cry out to be represented in coloured glass. Other windows commemorating mathematical and scientific advances by members of the college have since been added.