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SALSBURG, D. The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century. W. H. Freeman, New York, 2001. xi + 340 pp. $23.95/L16.99. ISBN 0-7167-4106-7.
A lady tasting tea appears in the second chapter of R. A. Fisher's text The Design of Experiments (1935). An experiment is designed to test her claim to be able to tell whether milk was poured into each cup before or after the tea infusion. David Salsburg reports that H. Fairfield Smith claimed in the late 1960s to have been present, with Fisher, the lady and others, at a university tea party in Cambridge in the late 1920s at which this took place. This story starts Salsburg's book, and so his main title may be explained. As it happens, there is at least one other version of the story, recounted in Joan Fisher Box's 1978 biography of Fisher, who was her father. In this the lady in question was an algologist, Muriel Bristol, and the venue was Rothamsted. As Smith worked with Fisher in 1935-1937 and Fisher did not return to Cambridge as Professor until 1943, this other version seems the more likely original, despite the possibility that similar exchanges became, as it were, a favourite party trick of Fisher's.
What Salsburg offers in this book is a series of essays on statistics in the twentieth century, written in an easy and entertaining style. Most are centred on individual people who contributed to statistical theory or practice. Colourful, larger-- than-life characters and those whose careers included struggles against adversity are especially well represented. Fisher, Karl Pearson and Jerzy Neyman predictably head the cast, but many other players appear at least...