"The Lady Tasting Tea"[1] is a fantastic book about statisticians. Someone recommended that book to me as an intro to stats, which it most certainly is not. However, if you have had even a single course in statistics, you will recognize many of the names and learn how they influenced the modern era.

Frankly, I wish the author had devoted a couple of pages at the end of each chapter to delve deeper into the technical concepts. Nonetheless, the book makes an interesting read, even for non-statisticians.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/The-Lady-Tasting-Tea-Revolutionized/dp...

This explained the issues well. Thank you for posting it.

Other reading material that may be of interest: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Tasting-Tea-Statistics-Revolution... Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century <a/>

Taleb's The Black Swan and MoneyBall (especially if you enjoy baseball)

If you're of the mathematical school that thinks the best way to learn any math field is to walk through the history of how we got here, then I'd recommend the recent book "The Lady Tasting Tea". It traces through the history of the great mathematical minds who created the field of statistics, explains the problems they were solving, how and why they were able to solve them, and how future problems and solutions built up over time into the field of statistics.

It is an academic book, and is more of a history book that explains the math, rather than a math text book; which is why I found it note worthy. It's also worth reading solely for the detailed citations, from which you could completely learn the core of the field by "studying the master's" original papers.

http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Tasting-Tea-Statistics-Revolution...