Yates was born in
Manchester, England, the eldest of five children (and only son) of seed merchant and
botanist 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 degree. He spent two years teaching
mathematics to
secondary school pupils at
Malvern College before heading to
Africa, where he was mathematical advisor on the
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. In 1931, Yates was appointed assistant statistician at
Rothamsted Experimental Station by
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. During
World War II he worked on what would later be called
operations research. After WWII, he worked on
sample survey design and analysis. He became an enthusiast of electronic
computers, in 1954 obtaining an
Elliott 401 for Rothamsted and contributing to the initial development of
statistical computing. 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. He retired from Rothamsted to become a senior research fellow at
Imperial College London. He died in 1994, aged 92, in
Harpenden. ==Selected publications==