Editing Frank Yates (section)

==Biography==
Yates was born in [[Manchester|Manchester, England]], the eldest of five children (and only son) of seed merchant and [[Botany|botanist]] [[Percy Gates Morgan|Percy Yates]] and his wife Edith. He attended [[Wadham House]], a [[private school]], before gaining a scholarship to [[Clifton College]] in 1916. In 1920, he obtained a scholarship at [[St John's College, Cambridge]], and four years later graduated with a [[First-class honours|First Class Honours]] degree.<ref name="frs"/><ref name="mactutor"/>

He spent two years teaching [[mathematics]] to [[Secondary School Mathematics Curriculum Improvement Study|secondary school]] pupils at [[Malvern College]] before heading to [[Africa]], where he was mathematical advisor on the [[Gold Coast (British colony)|Gold Coast]] Survey. He returned to [[England]], due to ill health, and met and married a chemist, Margaret Forsythe Marsden, the daughter of a [[civil servant]].  This marriage was dissolved in 1933, and he later married Prascovie (Pauline) Tchitchkine, previously the partner of Alexis Tchitchkine. After her death in 1976, he married Ruth Hunt, his long-time secretary.<ref name="frs"/><ref name="mactutor"/>

In 1931, Yates was appointed assistant statistician at [[Rothamsted Experimental Station]] by [[Ronald Fisher|R.A. Fisher]]. In 1933, he became head of statistics when Fisher went to [[University College London]]. At Rothamsted he worked on the [[design of experiments]], including contributions to the theory of [[analysis of variance]], as well as developing [[Yates's algorithm]] and the balanced incomplete [[block design]].<ref name="frs"/><ref name="mactutor"/><ref name="ims"/>

During [[World War II]] he worked on what would later be called [[operations research]].<ref name="frs"/><ref name="ims"/>

After WWII, he worked on [[sample survey]] design and analysis. He became an enthusiast of electronic [[computer]]s, in 1954 obtaining an [[Elliott Brothers (computer company)|Elliott 401]] for Rothamsted and contributing to the initial development of [[statistical computing]].<ref name="frs"/><ref name="mactutor"/><ref name="ims"/> During 1960–61, he was President of the [[British Computer Society]], succeeding the founding president and computer pioneer, [[Maurice Wilkes]]. In 1960, he was awarded the [[Guy Medal]] in Gold of the [[Royal Statistical Society]] and, in 1966, he was awarded the [[Royal Medal]] of the [[Royal Society]].<ref name="frs"/><ref name="mactutor"/> He retired from Rothamsted to become a senior research fellow at [[Imperial College London]].<ref name="frs"/><ref name="mactutor"/> He died in 1994, aged 92, in [[Harpenden]].<ref name="frs"/>