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Karl Pearson

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Karl Pearson

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Also known as Carl Pearson

English mathematician, biometrician, and eugenicist (1857–1936)

OverviewAI-generated

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) was a person associated with the United States. His recorded works include "On plane waves of the third order in an istropic elastic medium, etc," "The positive creed of freethought," "On the handicapping of the first-born," "Social problems: their treatment, past, present, and future," and "The scope and importance to the state of the science of national eugenics." Open Library lists 117 works under his name, while Crossref records five.

Pearson is recognized in the Royal Society collection and the American Academy Arts Sciences collection. His name appears in 826 other encyclopedia articles. On Last.fm, he is tagged with "cover" and "pop," with nine listeners and ten plays.

Synthesized by Vinony from 19 facts across 7 sources: Wikidata, Last.fm, Crossref, MusicBrainz, Open Library, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born
1857
Died
1936
Works
117

Top works

  • On plane waves of the third order in an istropic elastic medium, etc
  • The positive creed of freethought
  • "On the handicapping of the first-born,"
  • On the criterion that a given system of deviations from the probable in the case of a correlated system of variables is such that it can be reasonbly supposed to have arisen from random sampling
  • Social problems: their treatment, past, present, and future

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Country
US
Active from
1953-03-13

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
9
Total plays
10

Tags

coverpop

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Karl+Pearson">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Karl Pearson

Quotes

  • Heredity. Given any organ in a parent and the same or any other organ in its offspring, the mathematical measure of heredity is the correlation of these organs for pairs of parent and offspring... The word organ here must be taken to include any characteristic which can be quantitatively measured.
  • [M]y axiom runs as follows: "The whole is not identical with a part." This axiom leads us at once to a problem. What relation has the part to the whole?
  • I simply assert that the universe alters, is "becoming;" what it is becoming I will not venture to say. ...the individual too is altering, is not only a "being" but also a "becoming." These alterations... I shall—merely for convenience—term life.
  • What relation has the life of the individual to the life of the universe? ...The former is absolutely subordinate, inconceivably infinitesimal compared with the latter. The becoming of the latter bears not the slightest apparent reference to the becoming of the former. ...The one seems finite, limited, temporal, the other by comparison infinite, boundless, eternal. This disparity has forced itself upon the attention of man ever since his first childlike attempts at thought.
  • The "Eternal Why" begins to haunt his mind; "Why... am I here?" he asks. What relation do I, a part, bear to the whole—the sum of all things material and spiritual? What connection has the finite with the infinite? the temporal with the eternal?
  • The great danger... not content with our real knowledge of the relation of the finite to the infinite, they slur over our vast ignorance by the help of the imagination. Myth supplies the place of true knowledge where we are ignorant of the connection between finite and infinite. Hence... most concrete systems of religion present us with a certain amount of knowledge but a great deal of myth.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

~35 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Karl Pearson (/ˈpɪərsən/; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English biostatistician and mathematician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics and meteorology. Pearson was also a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, and his thought is an example of what is today described as scientific racism. Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He edited and completed both William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885) and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity, Vol. 1 (1886–1893) and Vol. 2 (1893), following their deaths.

Early life and education

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Karl Pearson” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (3)