Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson (March 27, 1857 – April 27, 1936) was a major contributor to the early development of statistics as a serious scientific discipline in its own right. He founded the Department of Applied Statistics at University College London in 1911; it was the first university statistics department in the world.

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 till 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.

Related Topics:
Biology - Epidemiology - Medicine - History - 1901 - Biometrika - Annals of Human Genetics - 1925

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Pearson's thinking underpins many of the 'classical' statistical methods which are in common use today. Some of his main contributions are:

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• 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.
• 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.