In 1989, the fellows of Gonville and Caius College (founded in 1348, and one of Cambridge University’s largest, wealthiest and most prestigious collegiate institutions) had the genial idea of fitting stained-glass windows in the dining hall to commemorate prominent scientists who had been among its members, counterbalancing the many lawyers and divines whose portraits adorn its walls. By the early 2000s the collection included a double helix, paying homage to Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and other windows showing the scientific achievements of men such as the mathematician and philosopher John Venn, the physicist James Chadwick and the physiologist Charles Sherrington.
The collection also includes a “Latin Square”, a mathematical device promoted by Ronald Fisher, who is widely regarded as the most important biostatistician of the 20th century. Richard Dawkins has called him “the greatest biologist since Darwin”. His book Statistical Methods for Research Workers, published in 1925, exercised a huge influence, and he is often referred to as the father of modern experimental design – the subject of another important book. For a long time he taught at University College London (UCL), where a professorship is named after him, before moving to Cambridge as Balfour Professor of Genetics and fellow of Gonville and Caius College, where he had studied as an undergraduate between 1909 and 1912.
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