You can found your answer if you looking for Pearson's correlation
coefficient (Pearson's Law).
Karl Pearson was born in Islington, London on March 27, 1857, the son
of barrister William Pearson and Fanny, née Smith. He was educated
privately at University College School, after which he went to King's
College, Cambridge to study mathematics. He then spent part of 1879
and 1880 studying medieval and 16th century German literature at the
universities of Berlin and Heidelberg ? in fact, he became
sufficiently knowledgeable in this field that he was offered a post in
the German department at Cambridge University.
His next career move was to Lincoln's Inn, 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. 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. The
collaboration, in biometry and evolutionary theory, was a fruitful one
and lasted until Weldon died in 1906. 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. 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 financing 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, 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.
Pearson married Maria Sharpe in 1890, and between them they had two
daughters and a son. The son, Egon Sharpe Pearson, succeeded him as
head of the Applied Statistics Department at University College.
When the 23 year-old Albert Einstein started a study group, the
Olympia Academy, with his two younger friends, Solovine and 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. 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 traveled 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)
Aside from his professional life, Pearson was active 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) 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 1930s he had a protracted feud with R.A. Fisher over a
statistical disagreement, which continued after his death through his
son.
Pearson's views on eugenics, however, would be considered deeply
racist today. Pearson openly advocated "war" against "inferior races,"
and saw this 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." He reasoned that, if August Weismann's theory of
germ plasm is correct, then 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." (Introduction, The Grammar of Science).
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Awards from professional bodies
Pearson achieved widespread recognition across a range of disciplines
and his membership of, and awards from, various professional bodies
reflects this:
1896: elected Fellow of the Royal Society
1898: awarded the Darwin Medal
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.
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Contributions to statistics
Pearson's work was all-embracing in the wide application and
development of mathematical statistics, and encompassed the fields of
biology, epidemiology, anthropometry, medicine and social history. In
1901, with Weldon and Galton, he founded the journal Biometrika whose
object was the development of statistical theory. He edited this
journal until his death. 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. Some of his main contributions
are:
Linear regression and correlation. Pearson was instrumental in the
development of this theory. One of his classic data sets (originally
collected by Galton) involves the regression of sons' height upon that
of their fathers'. Pearson built a 3-dimensional model of this data
set (which remains in the care of the Statistical Science Department)
to illustrate the ideas. The Pearson product-moment correlation
coefficient is named after him, and it was the first important effect
size to be introduced into statistics.
Classification of distributions. Pearson's work on classifying
probability distributions forms the basis for a lot of modern
statistical theory; in particular, the exponential family of
distributions underlies the theory of generalized linear models.
Pearson's chi-square test. A particular kind of chi-square test, a
statistical test of significance.
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Publications
The New Werther (1880)
The Trinity, A Nineteenth Century Passion Play (1882)
Die Fronica (1887)
The Ethic of Freethought (1886)
The Grammar of Science (1892), Dover Publications 2004 edition, ISBN 0486495817
On the dissection of asymmetrical frequency curves (1894)
Skew variation in homogeneous material (1895)
Regression, heredity and panmixia (1896)
On the criterion that a given system of deviations from the probable
in the case of a correlated system of variables is such that it can be
reasonably supposed to hove arisen from random sampling (1900)
Tables for Statisticians and Biometricians ((1914))
Tables of Incomplete Beta Function (1934)
The life, letters and labours of Francis Galton (3 vol.: 1914, 1924,
1930). Available in full at http://galton.org
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See also
Kikuchi Dairoku, a close friend and contemporary of Karl Pearson at
University College School and Cambridge University
list of Gresham Professors of Geometry
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References
Most of the biographical information above is taken from the Karl
Pearson page at the Department of Statistical Sciences at University
College London, which has been placed in the public domain. The main
source for this page was A list of the papers and correspondence of
Karl Pearson (1857-1936) held in the Manuscripts Room, University
College London Library, compiled by M. Merrington, B. Blundell, S.
Burrough, J. Golden and J. Hogarth and published by the Publications
Office, University College London, 1983.
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External links
John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson. Karl Pearson at the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
John Aldrich's Karl Pearson: a Reader's Guide contains many useful
links to further sources of information.
Gavan Tredoux's Francis Galton site, galton.org, contains Pearson's
biography of Francis Galton, and several other papers - in addition to
nearly all of Galton's own published works.
Karl Pearson and the Origins of Modern Statistics at The Rutherford Journal.
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Further reading
Porter, Theodore M. (2004): Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a
Statistical Age, Princeton University Press.
Eisenhart, Churchill (1974): Dictionary of Scientific Biography, pp.
447?73. New York, 1974.
Filon, L. N. G. and Yule, G. U. (1936): Obituary Notices of the Royal
Society of London, Vol. ii, No. 5, pp. 73?110.
Pearson, E. S. (1938): Karl Pearson: An appreciation of some aspects
of his life and work. Cambridge University Press.
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