We know that statistics was a field that developed a lot over the years, but the twentieth century was a huge year for modern statistics. One of the biggest developments was in inferential statistics, where you can take a subset (sample) of a large population and do some math on that subset and then generalize to the larger population. This is critical to so many fields, where it’s impossible to measure every single thing. Probability, sampling, and experiment design were all critical to allowing for good inference. The work done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth set us up for data in the computer age.