Karl Pearson
| Dr Karl Pearson FRS | |||||||||||
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| Born | 1857 | ||||||||||
| Died | 1936 | ||||||||||
| Residence |
Prof. of Eugenics and Director, Galton Laboratory, University College, London and 7 Well Road, Hampstead, NW [1903 list] Prof. of Applied Mathematics, University College London; 7 Well Road, Hampstead, NW [1913] | ||||||||||
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academic medical | ||||||||||
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Contents
Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
Proposed by John Gray; seconded by Henry Balfour, J.G. Garson 1903.04.28
neighbour of Flinders Petrie
1903 HML On the inheritance in man of mental and moral characters, and its relation to the inheritance of physical characters
Delivered on 16th Oct. at Burlington House
Notes From Elsewhere
Karl Pearson FRS[1] (/ˈpɪərsən/; originally named Carl; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936[2]) was an influential English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics,[3][4] and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics, meteorology, theories of social Darwinism and eugenics.[5] Pearson was also a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton.
In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London.
He was born to William Pearson and Fanny Smith, and had two siblings, Arthur, and Amy. Pearson was an accomplished historian and Germanist and spent much of the 1880s in Berlin, Heidelberg, Vienna[citation needed], Saig bei Lenzkirch, and Brixlegg. He wrote on Passion plays,[6] religion, Goethe, Werther, as well as sex-related themes,[7] and was a founder of the Men and Women's Club
Karl Pearson was educated privately at University College School, after which he went to King's College, Cambridge in 1876 to study mathematics,[9] graduating in 1879 as Third Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos. He then travelled to Germany to study physics at the University of Heidelberg under G H Quincke and metaphysics under Kuno Fischer. He next visited the University of Berlin, where he attended the lectures of the famous physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond on Darwinism (Emil was a brother of Paul du Bois-Reymond, the mathematician). Other subjects which he studied in Berlin included Roman Law, taught by Bruns and Mommsen, medieval and 16th century German Literature, and Socialism. He was strongly influenced by the courses he attended at this time and he became sufficiently expert on German literature that he was offered a Germanics post at Kings College, Cambridge. But compared to Cambridge students, physically developed by athletics, Karl found German students weak. He wrote his mother, "I used to think athletics and sport was overestimated at Cambridge, but now I think it cannot be too highly valued."[10]
On returning to England in 1880, Pearson first went to Cambridge:
Back in Cambridge, I worked in the engineering shops, but drew up the schedule in Mittel- and Althochdeutsch for the Medieval Languages Tripos.[11]
In his first book, The New Werther, Pearson gives a clear indication of why he studied so many diverse subjects:
I rush from science to philosophy, and from philosophy to our old friends the poets; and then, over-wearied by too much idealism, I fancy I become practical in returning to science. Have you ever attempted to conceive all there is in the world worth knowing—that not one subject in the universe is unworthy of study? The giants of literature, the mysteries of many-dimensional space, the attempts of Boltzmann and Crookes to penetrate Nature's very laboratory, the Kantian theory of the universe, and the latest discoveries in embryology, with their wonderful tales of the development of life—what an immensity beyond our grasp! [...] Mankind seems on the verge of a new and glorious discovery. What Newton did to simplify the planetary motions must now be done to unite in one whole the various isolated theories of mathematical physics.[12]
Pearson then returned to London to study law so that he might, like his father, be called to the Bar. Quoting Pearson's own account:
Coming to London, I read in chambers in Lincoln's Inn, drew up bills of sale, and was called to the Bar, but varied legal studies by lecturing on heat at Barnes, on Martin Luther at Hampstead, and on Lassalle and Marx on Sundays at revolutionary clubs around Soho.[11]
His next career move was to the Inner Temple, where he read law until 1881 (although he never practised). After this, he returned to mathematics, deputising for the mathematics professor at King's College, London in 1881 and for the professor at University College, London in 1883. In 1884, he was appointed to the Goldsmid Chair of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College, London. Pearson became the editor of Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885) when William Kingdon Clifford died. 1891 saw him also appointed to the professorship of Geometry at Gresham College; here he met Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, a zoologist who had some interesting problems requiring quantitative solutions.[13] The collaboration, in biometry and evolutionary theory, was a fruitful one and lasted until Weldon died in 1906.[14] Weldon introduced Pearson to Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, who was interested in aspects of evolution such as heredity and eugenics. Pearson became Galton's protégé—his "statistical heir" as some have put it—at times to the verge of hero worship.
In 1890 he married Maria Sharpe, and they had three children, Sigrid Loetitia Pearson, Helga Sharpe Pearson, and Egon Pearson, who became an eminent statistician himself and succeeded his father as head of the Applied Statistics Department at University College. Maria died in 1928 and in 1929 Karl married Margaret Victoria Child, a co-worker at the Biometric Laboratory. He and his family lived at 7 Well Road in Hampstead, now marked with a blue plaque.[15]
After Galton's death in 1911, Pearson embarked on producing his definitive biography—a three-volume tome of narrative, letters, genealogies, commentaries, and photographs—published in 1914, 1924, and 1930, with much of Pearson's own money paying for their print runs. The biography, done "to satisfy myself and without regard to traditional standards, to the needs of publishers or to the tastes of the reading public", triumphed Galton's life, work, and personal heredity. He predicted that Galton, rather than Charles Darwin, would be remembered as the most prodigious grandson of Erasmus Darwin.
When Galton died, he left the residue of his estate to the University of London for a Chair in Eugenics. Pearson was the first holder of this chair—the Galton Chair of Eugenics, later the Galton Chair of Genetics[16]—in accordance with Galton's wishes. He formed the Department of Applied Statistics (with financial support from the Drapers' Company), into which he incorporated the Biometric and Galton laboratories. He remained with the department until his retirement in 1933, and continued to work until his death in 1936.
When the 23-year-old Albert Einstein started a study group, the Olympia Academy, with his two younger friends, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, he suggested that the first book to be read was Pearson's The Grammar of Science. This book covered several themes that were later to become part of the theories of Einstein and other scientists.[17] Pearson asserted that the laws of nature are relative to the perceptive ability of the observer. Irreversibility of natural processes, he claimed, is a purely relative conception. An observer who travels at the exact velocity of light would see an eternal now, or an absence of motion. He speculated that an observer who travelled faster than light would see time reversal, similar to a cinema film being run backwards. Pearson also discussed antimatter, the fourth dimension, and wrinkles in time.
Pearson's relativity was based on idealism, in the sense of ideas or pictures in a mind. "There are many signs," he wrote, "that a sound idealism is surely replacing, as a basis for natural philosophy, the crude materialism of the older physicists." (Preface to 2nd Ed., The Grammar of Science) Further, he stated, "...science is in reality a classification and analysis of the contents of the mind..." "In truth, the field of science is much more consciousness than an external world." (Ibid., Ch. II, § 6) "Law in the scientific sense is thus essentially a product of the human mind and has no meaning apart from man." (Ibid., Ch. III, § 4)[
A eugenicist who applied his social Darwinism to entire nations, Pearson saw war against "inferior races" as a logical implication of his scientific work on human measurement: "My view – and I think it may be called the scientific view of a nation," he wrote, "is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races."[19] He reasoned that, if August Weismann's theory of germ plasm is correct, the nation is wasting money when it tries to improve people who come from poor stock.
Weismann claimed that acquired characteristics could not be inherited. Therefore, training benefits only the trained generation. Their children will not exhibit the learned improvements and, in turn, will need to be improved. "No degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings. Such means may render the individual members of a stock passable if not strong members of society, but the same process will have to be gone through again and again with their offspring, and this in ever-widening circles, if the stock, owing to the conditions in which society has placed it, is able to increase its numbers."[20]
"History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan's success depended."[21]
Pearson was known in his lifetime as a prominent "freethinker" and socialist. He gave lectures on such issues as "the woman's question" (this was the era of the suffragist movement in the UK)[22] and upon Karl Marx. His commitment to socialism and its ideals led him to refuse the offer of being created an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1920 and also to refuse a knighthood in 1935.
In The Myth of the Jewish Race[23] Raphael and Jennifer Patai cite Karl Pearson's 1925 opposition (in the first issue of the journal Annals of Eugenics which he founded) to Jewish immigration into Britain. Pearson alleged that these immigrants "will develop into a parasitic race. [...] Taken on the average, and regarding both sexes, this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population".[
Pearson achieved widespread recognition across a range of disciplines and his membership of, and awards from, various professional bodies reflects this:
· 1896: elected · FRS: Fellow of the · Royal Society· [2]
· 1898: awarded the · Darwin Medal· [25]
· 1911: awarded the honorary degree of LLD from the · University of St Andrews
· 1911: awarded a DSc from University of London
· 1920: offered (and refused) the · OBE
· 1932: awarded the Rudolf Virchow medal by the Berliner Anthropologische Gesellschaft
· 1935: offered (and refused) a · knighthood
He was also elected an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, University College London and the Royal Society of Medicine, and a Member of the Actuaries' Club. A sesquicentenary conference was held in London on 23 March 2007, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth.[3]
Pearson's work was all-embracing in the wide application and development of mathematical statistics, and encompassed the fields of biology, epidemiology, anthropometry, medicine, psychology and social history.[26] In 1901, with Weldon and Galton, he founded the journal Biometrika whose object was the development of statistical theory.[27] He edited this journal until his death. Among those who assisted Pearson in his research were a number of female mathematicians who included Beatrice Mabel Cave-Browne-Cave and Frances Cave-Browne-Cave. He also founded the journal Annals of Eugenics (now Annals of Human Genetics) in 1925. He published the Drapers' Company Research Memoirs largely to provide a record of the output of the Department of Applied Statistics not published elsewhere.
Pearson's thinking underpins many of the 'classical' statistical methods which are in common use today. Examples of his contributions are:
· · Correlation coefficient. The correlation coefficient (first conceived by · Francis Galton) was defined as a product-moment, and its relationship with · linear regression was studied.· [28]
· · Method of moments. Pearson introduced · moments, a concept borrowed from · physics, as descriptive statistics and for the fitting of distributions to samples.
· · Pearson's system of continuous curves. A system of continuous univariate probability distributions that came to form the basis of the now conventional continuous probability distributions. Since the system is complete up to the fourth moment, it is a powerful complement to the Pearsonian method of moments.
· · Chi distance. A precursor and special case of the · Mahalanobis distance.· [29]
· · P-value. Defined as the probability measure of the complement of the · ball with the hypothesized value as center point and chi distance as radius.· [29]
· Foundations of the · statistical hypothesis testing theory and the · statistical decision theory.· [29] In the seminal "On the criterion..." paper,· [29] Pearson proposed testing the validity of hypothesized values by evaluating the chi distance between the hypothesized and the empirically observed values via the p-value, which was proposed in the same paper. The use of · preset evidence criteria, so called alpha type-I error probabilities, was later proposed by · Jerzy Neyman and · Egon Pearson.· [30]
· · Pearson's chi-squared test. A hypothesis test using normal approximation for discrete data.
· · Principal component analysis. The method of fitting a · linear subspace to multivariate data by minimising the · chi distances.· [31]· [32]
· In the course of his studies of race, Pearson devised a Coefficient of Racial Likeness, calculated from several measurements of the human skull.
· The first introduction of the · histogram is usually credited to Pearson
Third Wrangler in Mathematics Tripos, Cambridge University, 1879 Studied medieval and sixteenth-century German literature, Berlin and Heidelberg Universities, 1879–1880 Read law, called to the Bar by Inner Temple, 1881 Delivered lectures on mathematics, philosophy and German literature at societies and clubs devoted to adult education Deputised for the Professor of Mathematics, King's College London, 1881, and for the Professor of Mathematics at University College London, 1883 Formed the Men and Women's Club, with some others, to discuss equality between the sexes Appointed to Goldsmid Chair of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics, University College London, 1884 Appointed Professor of Geometry, Gresham College, 1891 Collaborated with Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, in biometry and evolutionary theory, 1891–1906 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society, 1896 Founded journal Biometrika with Weldon and Francis Galton founder of the School of Eugenics at University College London, 1901 Appointed first Galton Professor of Eugenics, University College London, 1911 Formed Department of Applied Statistics incorporating the Biometric Laboratory and Galton Laboratory, University College London Founded journal Annals of Eugenics, 1925
Publications
External Publications
The chances of death and other studies. 2 vols. 1897; Mathematical contributions to the theory of evolution, 1904-7; Tables for statisticians and biometricians, 1914
Pearson, Karl (1880). The New Werther. C, Kegan Paul & Co. Pearson, Karl (1882). The Trinity: A Nineteenth Century Passion-play. Cambridge: E. Johnson. Pearson, Karl (1887). Die Fronica. Strassburg: K.J. Trübner Pearson, Karl (1887). The Moral Basis of Socialism. William Reeves, London. Pearson, Karl (1888). The Ethic of Freethought. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Rep. University Press of the Pacific, 2002. Pearson, Karl (1892). The Grammar of Science. London: Walter Scott. Dover Publications, 2004 ISBN 0-486-49581-7 Pearson, Karl (1892). The New University for London: A Guide to its History and a Criticism of its Defects. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Pearson, K (1896). "Mathematical Contributions to the Theory of Evolution. III. Regression, Heredity and Panmixia". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. 187: 253–318. doi:10.1098/rsta.1896.0007. Pearson, Karl (1897). The Chances of Death and Other Studies in Evolution, 2 Vol. London: Edward Arnold. Pearson, Karl (1904). On the Theory of Contingency and its Relation to Association and Normal Correlation. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl (1905). On the General Theory of Skew Correlation and Non-linear Regression. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl (1906). A Mathematical Theory of Random Migration. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl (1907). Studies in National Deterioration. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl, & Pollard, A.F. Campbell (1907). An Experimental Study of the Stresses in Masonry Dams. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl (1907). A First Study of the Statistics of Pulmonary Tuberculosis. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl, & Barrington, Amy (1909). A First Study of the Inheritance of Vision and of the Relative Influence of Heredity and Environment on Sight. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl; Reynolds, W. D., & Stanton, W. F. (1909). On a Practical Theory of Elliptical and Pseudo-elliptical Arches, with Special Reference to the Ideal Masonry Arch. Pearson, Karl (1909). The Groundwork of Eugenics. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl (1909). The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics. London: Dalau & Co. Pearson, Karl, & Barrington, Amy (1910). A Preliminary Study of Extreme Alcoholism in Adults. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl, & Elderton, Ethel M. (1910). A First Study of the Influence of Parental Alcoholism on the Physique and Ability of the Offspring. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl (1910). The Influence of Parental Alcoholism on the Physique and Ability of the Offspring: A Reply to the Cambridge Economists. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl, & Elderton, Ethel M. (1910). A Second Study of the Influence of Parental Alcoholism on the Physique and Ability of the Offspring. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl (1911). An Attempt to Correct some of the Misstatements Made by Sir Victor Horsley and Mary D. Sturge, M.D. in the Criticisms of the Galton Laboratory Memoir: A First Study of the Influence of Parental Alcoholism, &c. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl; Nettleship, Edward, & Usher, Charles (1911–1913). A Monograph on Albinism in Man, 2 Vol. London: Dulau & Co., Ltd. Pearson, Karl (1912). The Problem of Practical Eugenics. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl (1912). Tuberculosis, Heredity and Environment. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl (1913). On the Correlation of Fertility with Social Value: A Cooperative Study. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl, & Jaederholm, Gustav A. (1914). Mendelism and the Problem of Mental Defect, II: On the Continuity of Mental Defect. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl; Williams, M.H., & Bell, Julia (1914). A Statistical Study of Oral Temperatures in School Children. London: Dulau & Co. Pearson, Karl (1914-24-30). The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 3 Vol. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pearson, Karl (1915). Some Recent Misinterpretations of the Problem of Nurture and Nature. Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Karl; Young, A.W., & Elderton, Ethel (1918). On the Torsion Resulting from Flexure in Prisms with Cross-sections of Uni-axial Symmetry Only. Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Karl, & Bell, Julia (1919). A Study of the Long Bones of the English Skeleton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Karl (1920). The Science of Man: its Needs and its Prospects. Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Karl, & Karn, Mary Noel (1922). Study of the Data Provided by a Baby-clinic in a Large Manufacturing Town. Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Karl (1922). Francis Galton, 1822–1922: A Centenary Appreciation. Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Karl (1923). On the Relationship of Health to the Psychical and Physical Characters in School Children. Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Karl (1926). On the Skull and Portraits of George Buchanan. Edinburgh, London: Oliver & Boyd
