Short answers, pulled from the story.
Gottfried Achenwall coined the word statistik in 1749 to describe a collection of quantitative information about a state. The term derives from the Latin word status meaning situation or condition and originally referred to political arrangements of a country.
The modern field of statistics began to take shape in the 19th century when Belgian scientist Adolphe Quetelet introduced the notion of the average man. Quetelet organized the First International Statistical Congress in Brussels in 1853 to unify measurement in statistical research.
Ronald Fisher developed the concept of the null hypothesis during the Lady tasting tea experiment in the 1910s and 1920s. The null hypothesis is never proved or established but is possibly disproved in the course of experimentation and remains central to statistical testing today.
Type I errors occur when the null hypothesis is falsely rejected giving a false positive while Type II errors occur when the null hypothesis fails to be rejected when it is in fact false giving a false negative. Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson introduced these concepts in the 1930s to help statisticians understand the limitations and errors inherent in statistical analysis.
Rapid increases in computing power starting from the second half of the 20th century transformed statistics from a manual discipline to a computational powerhouse. This shift enabled the use of nonlinear models such as neural networks and computationally intensive methods like permutation tests and the bootstrap.