MacTutor
Karl Pearson
Times obituary
EUGENICS AND STATISTICS
The death at the age of 79 is announced of Dr. Karl Pearson, F.R.S., Emeritus Professor of Eugenics and formerly Director of the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, University of London.
On April 23, 1934, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of London and other distinguished pupils and friends assembled to do honor to their old master, Karl Pearson, who had retired from the Galton Chair six months earlier. He told them that his retreat was strategic. "I have had what I had not had for 50 years at least—time to think," he said. "It is a laborious task to think after having given it up for 50 years and having restarted at 77." It was hard to realize that their guest was indeed 77, and it will be still harder to realize that Karl Pearson will never again excite passionate loyalty or violent opposition. He continued:-
It was Galton (he said) who first freed me from the prejudice that sound mathematics could only be applied to natural phenomena under the category of causation. Here for the first time was a possibility, I will not say a certainty, of reaching knowledge as valid as physical knowledge was then thought to be in the field of living forms, and above all in the field of human conduct.
For 18 years after Karl Pearson had made biometry, as the application of mathematical methods to the study of biological problems was called, his chief interest, he continued to teach applied mathematics and indeed made important contributions to the subject. Only after his appointment in 1911 to the Chair of Eugenics, endowed under Francis Galton's will, was he able to devote himself wholly to his favorite studies. From the beginning it could no more be said of him than it could truthfully have been said of the author of the line, "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife." Biologists who resented the application of mathematical methods to their subject, physicians who resented trenchant attacks on their neglect of statistical methods, philanthropists who objected to his perhaps excessive scorn of environmental betterment, all attacked him, and he replied to all. For good, and perhaps sometimes for evil, he had an affinity with the Scaligers and the Bentleys, a real joy in combat. But these controversies did not hinder him any more than they hindered them from effecting a great constructive work.
The modern science and art of applied statistics owes more to Karl Pearson than to any other man. Probably the majority of the leading teachers and investigators in the field of statistics in Great Britain and America have been Pearson's pupils, and none have not been profoundly influenced by his work No doubt some of the methods he invented have proved less useful than he supposed; possibly he pointed too strongly to the antithesis between nature and nurture, but that he was one of the greatest intellectual forces in British science during the last 40 years is indisputable. No young man came under his influence without realizing the truth of Helmholtz's remark that contact with a great investigator alters one's whole scale of values. By the general reader Karl Pearson will be best remembered as the author of "The Grammar of Science," although his monumental "Life and Letters of Francis Galton" is brilliantly written, and his early volumes of essays, particularly "The Ethic of Free Thought," would add to the reputation of any man of letters. With him has passed away one of the giants of the late Victorian age, always loyal to what he held to be scientific truth.
Karl Pearson, the son of William Pearson, K.C., was educated at University College School and was a scholar of King's College, Cambridge, where he was elected a Fellow after taking a first-class degree in the Mathematical Tripos in 1879 and an honorary Fellow in 1903. He was elected F.R.S. in 1896 and was awarded the Society's Darwin Medal in 1898 and the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1908. He was an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a member of various foreign learned societies, an honorary D.Sc. of London, an honorary LL.D. of St. Andrews, and an honorary Fellow of University College, London. He was twice married and left a son, Dr. E. S. Pearson, Professor of Statistics at the University of London, and two daughters.
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"An Old Pupil," writes:
I have heard many tributes to the late Karl Pearson's qualities as a teacher from those who have worked at the Galton Laboratory. May I be allowed a word as to earlier days? I was among his earliest pupils at University College when he first came there as Professor of Applied Mathematics. Among other pupils of the same date were G. T. Bennett, later of St. John's, Cambridge, and Senior Wrangler, Miss P. G. Fawcett, who was "above the Senior Wrangler," and A. Vaughan, who went to Trinity with a major scholarship in the same year. There could be no doubt as to the inspiring character of "K. P.'s" teaching. He succeeded W. K. Clifford, and it was almost a point of honor with him to maintain something of Clifford's originality in his lectures He was no "text-book" teacher and could impart an understanding of the fundamentals of a subject with greater ease and in a shorter time than any mathematical lecturer I have since known. His personal appearance was arresting: the typical Greek athlete, with finely cut features and a magnificent physique. In his undergraduate days, he once walked home to London from Cambridge in 10–11 hours. He was certainly a pertinacious controversialist, but in any personal discussion, his humorous twinkle was disarming.
I was present on the occasion of the dinner when a presentation was made to him on his retirement from the Directorship of the Galton Laboratory, and after the dinner I remember talking together with him and A. R. Forsyth, another distinguished mathematical teacher, whose lectures I also recall with gratitude. Many Cambridge mathematicians of the 1880s will have followed with much enjoyment the recent friendly controversy between Karl Pearson and Forsyth concerning the Cambridge tripos of those days.
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This letter to the editor of The Times was found on the late Professor Pearson's blotting pad a few hours after his death on April 27
Sir,
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has a subsection entitled "Division of Intercourse and Education." This division publishes a monthly journal entitled International Conciliation. In this journal appears a number of most useful reprints of documents, which it would be hard to lay one's hands on quickly elsewhere. I may cite "Text of German Conscription Announcement," "Broadcast of Sir Samuel Hoare, October 15, 1935," "Speech of M. Pierre Laval before League Assembly, September 13, 1935," and more recently "Hitler's Speech to the Reichstag on March 7, 1936," "Text of Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, May 2, 1935," etc., etc. All this is most valuable work and enables the reader to correct his judgment of important documents and speeches, hastily read, often in abstract only, in the daily press.
Unfortunately, the committee responsible for this publication have added to their issue a number of documents and speeches articles selected from the world's press, apparently to illustrate public opinion in various countries. The selection is a most unfortunate one and by no means tends toward "international conciliation." It will be sufficient here to cite one article extracted from the American Nation. This paper has nothing to do with our European difficulties; it is a journalistic demonstration that the idea of a contest between America and Japan is a myth because military action is impossible and their battle fleets could not cross the Pacific. The topic may have little to do with "international conciliation," and it is not obvious why it should appear in the journal of that name, but it contains two paragraphs which will tend rather toward international irritation than toward any conciliation. After citing the opinion that neither the American nor the Japanese battleships could get as far as Midway Island, the author continues:
I am, &c.,
KARL PEARSON.
EUGENICS AND STATISTICS
The death at the age of 79 is announced of Dr. Karl Pearson, F.R.S., Emeritus Professor of Eugenics and formerly Director of the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, University of London.
On April 23, 1934, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of London and other distinguished pupils and friends assembled to do honor to their old master, Karl Pearson, who had retired from the Galton Chair six months earlier. He told them that his retreat was strategic. "I have had what I had not had for 50 years at least—time to think," he said. "It is a laborious task to think after having given it up for 50 years and having restarted at 77." It was hard to realize that their guest was indeed 77, and it will be still harder to realize that Karl Pearson will never again excite passionate loyalty or violent opposition. He continued:-
In Cambridge, I studied mathematics under Routh, Stokes, Cayley, and Clerk-Maxwell, but read papers on Spinoza. In Heidelberg, I studied civics under Quincke, but also metaphysics under Kuno Fischer. In Berlin, I studied Roman law under Bruns and Mommsen, but attended the lectures of Dubois Reymond on Darwinism. Back at Cambridge, I worked in the engineering shops, but drew up the schedule in Middle and Old High German for the Medieval Languages Tripos. Coming to London, I read in chambers at 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 Lasalle and Marx on Sundays at revolutionary clubs around Soho.With Pearson's appointment in 1885 to succeed Clifford in the Chair of Applied Mathematics at University College, London, his peripatetic activities ceased. A few years later, the first edition of the "Grammar of Science" introduced him to a wider public. Had he died 40 years ago, before the very words biometry and eugenics had been coined, his name would still be remembered. But it was the intellectual stimulus of reading Francis Galton's "Natural Inheritance," and friendship, first with his colleague the late W. F. R. Weldon, and a little later with Francis Galton himself, which led Pearson to undertake the work that made him one of the best loved and most hated figures of modern science.
It was Galton (he said) who first freed me from the prejudice that sound mathematics could only be applied to natural phenomena under the category of causation. Here for the first time was a possibility, I will not say a certainty, of reaching knowledge as valid as physical knowledge was then thought to be in the field of living forms, and above all in the field of human conduct.
For 18 years after Karl Pearson had made biometry, as the application of mathematical methods to the study of biological problems was called, his chief interest, he continued to teach applied mathematics and indeed made important contributions to the subject. Only after his appointment in 1911 to the Chair of Eugenics, endowed under Francis Galton's will, was he able to devote himself wholly to his favorite studies. From the beginning it could no more be said of him than it could truthfully have been said of the author of the line, "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife." Biologists who resented the application of mathematical methods to their subject, physicians who resented trenchant attacks on their neglect of statistical methods, philanthropists who objected to his perhaps excessive scorn of environmental betterment, all attacked him, and he replied to all. For good, and perhaps sometimes for evil, he had an affinity with the Scaligers and the Bentleys, a real joy in combat. But these controversies did not hinder him any more than they hindered them from effecting a great constructive work.
The modern science and art of applied statistics owes more to Karl Pearson than to any other man. Probably the majority of the leading teachers and investigators in the field of statistics in Great Britain and America have been Pearson's pupils, and none have not been profoundly influenced by his work No doubt some of the methods he invented have proved less useful than he supposed; possibly he pointed too strongly to the antithesis between nature and nurture, but that he was one of the greatest intellectual forces in British science during the last 40 years is indisputable. No young man came under his influence without realizing the truth of Helmholtz's remark that contact with a great investigator alters one's whole scale of values. By the general reader Karl Pearson will be best remembered as the author of "The Grammar of Science," although his monumental "Life and Letters of Francis Galton" is brilliantly written, and his early volumes of essays, particularly "The Ethic of Free Thought," would add to the reputation of any man of letters. With him has passed away one of the giants of the late Victorian age, always loyal to what he held to be scientific truth.
Karl Pearson, the son of William Pearson, K.C., was educated at University College School and was a scholar of King's College, Cambridge, where he was elected a Fellow after taking a first-class degree in the Mathematical Tripos in 1879 and an honorary Fellow in 1903. He was elected F.R.S. in 1896 and was awarded the Society's Darwin Medal in 1898 and the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1908. He was an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a member of various foreign learned societies, an honorary D.Sc. of London, an honorary LL.D. of St. Andrews, and an honorary Fellow of University College, London. He was twice married and left a son, Dr. E. S. Pearson, Professor of Statistics at the University of London, and two daughters.
________________________________________________________________________
"An Old Pupil," writes:
I have heard many tributes to the late Karl Pearson's qualities as a teacher from those who have worked at the Galton Laboratory. May I be allowed a word as to earlier days? I was among his earliest pupils at University College when he first came there as Professor of Applied Mathematics. Among other pupils of the same date were G. T. Bennett, later of St. John's, Cambridge, and Senior Wrangler, Miss P. G. Fawcett, who was "above the Senior Wrangler," and A. Vaughan, who went to Trinity with a major scholarship in the same year. There could be no doubt as to the inspiring character of "K. P.'s" teaching. He succeeded W. K. Clifford, and it was almost a point of honor with him to maintain something of Clifford's originality in his lectures He was no "text-book" teacher and could impart an understanding of the fundamentals of a subject with greater ease and in a shorter time than any mathematical lecturer I have since known. His personal appearance was arresting: the typical Greek athlete, with finely cut features and a magnificent physique. In his undergraduate days, he once walked home to London from Cambridge in 10–11 hours. He was certainly a pertinacious controversialist, but in any personal discussion, his humorous twinkle was disarming.
I was present on the occasion of the dinner when a presentation was made to him on his retirement from the Directorship of the Galton Laboratory, and after the dinner I remember talking together with him and A. R. Forsyth, another distinguished mathematical teacher, whose lectures I also recall with gratitude. Many Cambridge mathematicians of the 1880s will have followed with much enjoyment the recent friendly controversy between Karl Pearson and Forsyth concerning the Cambridge tripos of those days.
________________________________________________________
This letter to the editor of The Times was found on the late Professor Pearson's blotting pad a few hours after his death on April 27
Sir,
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has a subsection entitled "Division of Intercourse and Education." This division publishes a monthly journal entitled International Conciliation. In this journal appears a number of most useful reprints of documents, which it would be hard to lay one's hands on quickly elsewhere. I may cite "Text of German Conscription Announcement," "Broadcast of Sir Samuel Hoare, October 15, 1935," "Speech of M. Pierre Laval before League Assembly, September 13, 1935," and more recently "Hitler's Speech to the Reichstag on March 7, 1936," "Text of Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, May 2, 1935," etc., etc. All this is most valuable work and enables the reader to correct his judgment of important documents and speeches, hastily read, often in abstract only, in the daily press.
Unfortunately, the committee responsible for this publication have added to their issue a number of documents and speeches articles selected from the world's press, apparently to illustrate public opinion in various countries. The selection is a most unfortunate one and by no means tends toward "international conciliation." It will be sufficient here to cite one article extracted from the American Nation. This paper has nothing to do with our European difficulties; it is a journalistic demonstration that the idea of a contest between America and Japan is a myth because military action is impossible and their battle fleets could not cross the Pacific. The topic may have little to do with "international conciliation," and it is not obvious why it should appear in the journal of that name, but it contains two paragraphs which will tend rather toward international irritation than toward any conciliation. After citing the opinion that neither the American nor the Japanese battleships could get as far as Midway Island, the author continues:
One is disposed to accept this opinion, knowing one recalls that the two greatest navies of the world were almost within hearing distance of each other during the World War, and yet the admirals dared risk only one encounter. They are still arguing over who won the Battle of Jutland, since both sides turned tail and ran at the first good opportunity.—I.C., April, 1936.And again:
Admiral Sims's strictures upon battleships during the War remain unanswered. Our after the World Fleets may not cower in port as did British Dreadnoughts from 1914 to 1918, but they cannot move sufficiently far from their bases to be thoroughly effective offensive weapons. Ibid, p. 209.It seems to me that a direct question may be put to the Director, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, and to his committeeman, Professor Gilbert Murray, as to whether they hold this type of writing tends toward international conciliation.
I am, &c.,
KARL PEARSON.
