In 1909, a young mathematician named Ronald Fisher entered Caius College in Cambridge. Born with a hereditary condition that caused a progressive loss of vision, Fisher had become nearly blind by his early teens. He had learned mathematics largely without paper or pen and thus acquired the ability to visualize problems in his mind’s eye before writing equations on paper. Fisher excelled at math as a secondary school student, but his poor eyesight became a liability at Cambridge. Humiliated by his tutors, who were disappointed in his abilities to read and write mathematics, he switched to
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