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Karl Pearson's Gresham lectures: W. F. R. Weldon, speciation and the origins of Pearsonian statistics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

M. Eileen Magnello
M. Eileen Magnello
Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE.
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Extract

The scientific legacy of Karl Pearson and his role as one of the principal architects of the modern theory of mathematical statistics, has generated enough interest to have created an intellectual enterprise on various aspects of his life and work. Despite this interest, Pearson's earliest and most formative statistical work which he delivered in thirty of his thirty-eight Gresham lectures from 17 November 1891 to 11 May 1894 has, to date, been given very little consideration. Pearson is perhaps, best known to historians of science for his first eight Gresham lectures, delivered in London in February and May, 1891, on ‘The Scope and Method of Modern Science’, as these lectures were published with modification in the Grammar of Science in 1892. The only discussions which have emerged from some of the other thirty lectures have come from Egon Pearson and Steve Stigler. As the great bulk of these lectures have not been fully utilized, previous attempts to identify the impetus to his statistical work have been derived either from his teaching of correlation at University College London in 1895–96 or from his third statistical paper which, in part, addresses Francis Galton's work on simple correlation and simple regression. In spite of the emphasis on Galton's work on simple correlation and regression, little attention has been given to Pearson's more innovative work in that paper, which includes his development of the following statistical methods: multiple correlation, multiple regression, the standard error of estimate, the coefficient of variation and the use of determinantal matrix algebra for biometrical methods. This use of a higher form of algebra not only provided a most striking departure from earlier forms and uses of statistics, but it led to an increasing specialization in the emerging discipline of ‘mathematical statistics’.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 43 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1996

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References

1 More than forty articles and books have been written on Pearson. The standard work on Pearson's statistical work includes the following: Pearson, Egon, ‘Karl Pearson: an appreciation of some aspects of his life and work’ Part 1. 1857–1905, Biometrika (1936), 28, 193–257Google Scholar; Part 2. 1906–1936, ibid. (1938), 29, 61–248 (reprinted, Cambridge, 1936); Farrall, Lyndsay, ‘The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement. 1865–1925’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Indiana, 1970Google Scholar; Hilts, Victor, Statist and Statistician, New York, 1981Google Scholar; Mackenzie, Donald, ‘Statistical theory and social interests: a case study’, Social Studies of Science (1978), 8, 35–83CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed and Statistics in Britain 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge, Edinburgh, 1981Google Scholar; Norton, Bernard, ‘Karl Pearson and statistics: the social origin of scientific innovations’, Social Studies of Science, (1978), 8, 3–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Karl Pearson and the Galtonian Tradition: Studies in the Rise of Quantitative Social Biology’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1978; Porter, Theodore, The Rise of Statistical Thinking: 1820–1900, Princeton, 1986Google Scholar; and Stigler, Steven M., The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900, Cambridge, MA, 1986.Google Scholar

2 The first twelve lectures dealt with graphical statistics, the next eight with probability and the final ten with goodness of fit testing. For all syllabuses, see KP:UCL #48 and for extant lectures, see KP:UCL #49–51.

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