Karl Pearson built modern statistics and tied it to a discredited creed
Karl Pearson founded the world's first university statistics department and wrote a book that a young Einstein chose as his reading group's first text. He also spent decades trying to make eugenics a science, and in 2020 his old university removed his name from two of its buildings.
Pearson was born in Islington, London, on 27 March 1857, into a Quaker family; his father was a barrister of the Inner Temple. He read mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, finishing as Third Wrangler in 1879, then went to Germany to study physics and metaphysics in Heidelberg and hear lectures on Darwinism in Berlin. Back in England he worked in engineering shops, drafted a syllabus in medieval German, and was called to the Bar, while lecturing on heat, on Martin Luther and, on Sundays, on Marx in radical Soho clubs. His first book, The New Werther, confessed a restless urge to study everything.
In 1884 University College London gave him its chair of applied mathematics and mechanics. At Gresham College he met the zoologist Walter Weldon, whose biological puzzles needed numbers; their partnership in biometry lasted until Weldon died in 1906, and Weldon introduced him to Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin. Pearson became Galton's protégé and later his biographer, publishing three volumes between 1914 and 1930 largely at his own expense.
His Grammar of Science argued that natural laws depend on the observer's powers of perception and mused about a traveller moving at light speed seeing an eternal now. In 1902 the 23-year-old Einstein proposed it as the first reading for the Olympia Academy. In 1911 Pearson set up the first university statistics department, and on Galton's death became the first holder of the chair Galton endowed for eugenics, later renamed for genetics.
That chair points to the darker side. An atheist and socialist, Pearson nonetheless applied social Darwinism to whole nations, treated struggle between races as the engine of civilisation, and in 1925 opposed Jewish immigration to Britain. When he handed over the journal he had founded, he admitted a sense of failure in turning the subject into a guide for policy. His son Egon succeeded him as a leading statistician. Pearson died in Surrey on 27 April 1936.
Source: Karl Pearson
