Karl Pearson (; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English biostatistician and mathematician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics."[...] the founder of modern statistics, Karl Pearson." – Bronowski, Jacob (1978). The Common Sense of Science, Harvard University Press, p. 128. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics. Pearson was also a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, and his thought is an example of what is today described as scientific racism. Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He edited and completed both William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885) and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity, Vol. 1 (1886–1893) and Vol. 2 (1893), following their deaths.
Early life and education Pearson was born in Islington, London, into a Quaker family. His father was William Pearson QC of the Inner Temple, and his mother Fanny (née Smith), and he had two siblings, Arthur and Amy. Pearson attended University College School, followed by King's College, Cambridge, in 1876 to study mathematics, 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 physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond on Darwinism (Emil was a brother of Paul du Bois-Reymond, the mathematician). Pearson also studied Roman Law, taught by Bruns and Mommsen, medieval and 16th century German Literature, and Socialism. He became an accomplished historian and Germanist and spent much of the 1880s in Berlin, Heidelberg, Vienna, Saig bei Lenzkirch, and Brixlegg. He wrote on Passion plays,Pearson, Karl (1897). "The German Passion-Play: A Study in the Evolution of Western Christianity," in The Chances of Death and Other Studies in Evolution. London: Edward Arnold, pp. 246–406. religion, Goethe, Werther, as well as sex-related themes,Pearson, Karl (1888). "A Sketch of the Sex-Relations in Primitive and Mediæval Germany," in The Ethic of Freethought. London: T. Fisher Unwin, pp. 395–426. and was a founder of the Men and Women's Club.Walkowitz, Judith R., History Workshop Journal 1986 21(1):37–59, p. 37
Pearson was offered a Germanics post at King's College, Cambridge. Comparing Cambridge students to those he knew from Germany, Karl found German students inathletic and weak. He wrote to his mother, "I used to think athletics and sport was overestimated at Cambridge, but now I think it cannot be too highly valued."
On returning to England in 1880, Pearson first went to Cambridge:
In his first book, The New Werther, Pearson gives a clear indication of why he studied so many diverse subjects:
Pearson then returned to London to study law, emulating his father. Quoting Pearson's own account:
Career 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.Provine, William B. (2001). The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. University of Chicago Press, p. 29. The collaboration, in biometry and evolutionary theory, was a fruitful one and lasted until Weldon died in 1906.Tankard Jr., James W. (1984). The Statistical Pioneers, Schenkman Pub. Co. 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.
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 GeneticsBlaney, Tom (2011). The Chief Sea Lion's Inheritance: Eugenics and the Darwins. Troubador Pub., p. 108. Also see Pearson, Roger (1991). Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe. Scott-Townsend Publishers.—in accordance with Galton's wishes. Pearson formed the Department of Applied Statistics (with financial support from the Drapers' Company), which combined the Biometric and Galton Laboratories. He remained with the department until his retirement in 1933, and continued to work until his death.
Personal life
In 1890, Pearson married Maria Sharpe. The couple had three children: Sigrid Loetitia Pearson, Helga Sharpe Pearson, and Egon Pearson, who became a 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."Karl Pearson Blue Plaque", at Openplaques.org. He died at Coldharbour, Surrey, on 27 April 1936.
Einstein and Pearson's work When the 23-year-old Albert Einstein started the Olympia Academy study group in 1902, with his two younger friends, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, his first reading suggestion 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.Herbert, Christopher (2001). "Karl Pearson and the Human Form Divine," in Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery, Chicago University Press, pp. 145–179. Pearson asserted that the laws of nature are relative to the perceptive ability of the observer. Irreversibility of natural processes, he argued, 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 second 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)Pearson, Karl (1900). The Grammar of Science. London: Adam & Charles Black, pp. vii, 52, 87.
Political views and eugenics
Pearson was a zealous atheist, freethinker,McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy: Yale UP, 2011. Print. "Karl Pearson...was a zealous atheist..."Porter, Theodore M. Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Print. and socialist. He gave lectures on such issues as "the woman's question" (this was the era of the suffragist movement in the UK)Pearson, Karl (1888). "The Woman's Question," in The Ethic of Freethought. London: T. Fisher Unwin, pp. 370–394. 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.
A eugenicist who applied social Darwinism to entire nations, Pearson saw war against "inferior races" as a logical implication of the theory of evolution. "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."Pearson, Karl (1901). National Life from the Standpoint of Science. London: Adam & Charles Black, pp. 43–44. 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 argued 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."Pearson, Karl (1892). Introduction to The Grammar of Science. London: Water Scott, p. 32.
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.Pearson, Karl (1901). National Life from the Standpoint of Science. London: Adam & Charles Black, pp. 19–20.
In The Myth of the Jewish RacePatai, Raphael, & Jennifer Patai (1989). The Myth of the Jewish Race. Wayne State University Press, p. 146. 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 concluding remarks on stepping down as editor of the Annals of Eugenics, indicate a sense of failure of his aim to use the scientific study of eugenics as a guide for moral conduct and public policy.
Nonetheless, in June 2020 UCL announced that it was renaming two buildings which had been named after Pearson, because of his connection with eugenics.
Contributions to biometrics