Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson was born on 27 March 1857 in London and died on 27 April 1936 in Coldharbour, Surrey. Appointed Goldsmid Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College London in 1885, he later became the first Galton Professor of Eugenics there from 1911 to 1933, a position and a movement now widely rejected on their own terms even as his statistical methods remain in everyday use independent of that context. He developed the correlation coefficient and regression analysis, coined the term standard deviation in 1893, and in 1900 introduced the chi-squared test of statistical significance, a method still used across every quantitative field to compare observed and expected results. In 1901 he co-founded the journal Biometrika, which he edited for thirty five years, and from around 1906 he built a postgraduate statistics center at University College London that turned statistics into a rigorous academic discipline. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1896 and received its Darwin Medal in 1898.