Karl Pearson

"[W]e are frequently told that the growth of science is destroying the beauty and poetry of life. It is undoubtedly rendering many of the old interpretations of life meaningless, because it demonstrates that they are false to the facts which they profess to describe. It does not follow from this, however, that the aesthetic and scientific judgments are opposed; the fact is, that with the growth of our scientific knowledge the basis of the aesthetic judgment is changing and must change. There is more real beauty [satisfaction,.. permanent delight] in what science has to tell us of the chemistry of a distant star, or in the life history of a protozoon than in any produced by the creative imagination of a pre-scientific age."

"[T]he laws of science are products of the human mind rather than factors of the external world."

"[I]t is better to be content with the fraction of a right solution than to beguile ourselves with the whole of a wrong solution."

"Step by step [aesthetic] judgment, restless under the growth of positive knowledge, has discarded creed after creed and philosophic system after philosophic system."

"[O]nly little by little, slowly... man, by the aid of organised observation and careful reasoning, can hope to reach knowledge of the truth... science... is the sole gateway to a knowledge which can harmonise with our past as well as with our... future... As Clifford puts it, "Scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.""

"It was only the feeling that, at least in one or two aspects of Francis Galton's later life and of his scientific work, I could perhaps put his contributions to human knowledge more adequately than possibly one or another who might take up the task, if I resigned it, and who would hardly grasp the bearing of that long and intimate scientific correspondence between Galton, Weldon and myself, that I persevered in my endeavour to give some account of a life, wherein an important chapter of personal development must remain largely unrecorded."

"[I]t was soon clear to me that I was collecting as much information bearing on the family history of Charles Darwin as on that of Francis Galton. It seemed desirable to place the two men to some extent in contrast in my volume, showing in ancestry, in methods of work and in outlook on life what they had in common and how they differed."

"If my view be correct, Erasmus Darwin planted the seed of suggestion in questioning whether adaptation meant no more to man than illustration of creative ingenuity; the one grandson, Charles Darwin, collected the facts which had to be dealt with and linked them together by wide-reaching hypotheses; the other grandson, Francis Galton, provided the methods by which they could be tested..."

"Those who know the real history of the one occasion on which Galton and Darwin disagreed know how loyal Galton was to Darwin—loyal with a loyalty far rarer to-day. Galton would not have wished me to put him in the same rank as his master, but the reader who follows my story to the end may possibly see that the ramifications of Galton's methods are producing a renascence in innumerable branches of science..."

"[T]his work... is intended fundamentally as a permanent memorial to the Founder of the , and embraces material which may easily perish or be ultimately lost sight of. ...My object is... to issue a volume to some extent worthy of the name of the man it bears,—which may be studied hereafter by those who wish to understand him, his origin and his aims..."

"[T]his work is not written to gain a public, but piam memoriam prodere conditoris nostri and is intended especially for those who have known and loved Francis Galton in the past, or who may in the future desire to understand and honour him."

"The statistician Karl Pearson analyzed a large number of outcomes at certain roulette tables and suggested that the wheels were biased. He wrote in 1894: Clearly, since the Casino does not serve the valuable end of huge laboratory for the preparation of probability statistics, it has no scientific raison d’être... [E]arly experiments were suggestive and led to important discoveries in probability and statistics. They led Pearson to the ', which is of great importance in testing whether observed data fit a given ."

"Before meeting with Weldon... Pearson had grown into a social Darwinist anxious to provide his particular form of Darwinism with a proper scientific basis, and to show that Darwin's ideas and socialism were complementary, and not opposed, as had been maintained by several leading thinkers of the nineteenth century. Biometry offered him the chance of pursuing these ends. Moreover... Pearson's conception of 'properly scientific'... was one that made it probable that the development of biometry... would yield a harvest of statistical methods. Statistics, thus formed, embodied the central tenets of Pearson's philosophy of science, and, as such, was to be universally recommended."

"During the first two terms of 1881 he deputised for W. H. Drew, Professor of Mathematics at King's College, London, taking the senior mathematical teaching. It was in 1882... that he was engaged in his first considerable piece of mathematical work, according to his friend W. H. Macaulay "a theory of pulsating spheres in a fluid, forming an Atomic Theory,... a thing in spherical harmonics of the Clerk-Maxwell type." This work, or part of it, was probably not published till 1887. In 1883 two papers were printed "On the Motion of Spherical and Ellipsoidal Bodies in Fluid Media", and another "Note on Twists in an Infinite Elastic Solid". It was a natural step from such research to the completion of Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences and Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity. We see from the subject-matter of these papers how Pearson's mind was already at work puzzling over the laws of the physical universe, which in terms of the Grammar of Science describe the "how" rather than the "why.""

"It was Karl Pearson, a man with an unquenchable ambition for scholarly recognition and the kind of drive and determination that had taken Hannibal over the Alps and Marco Polo to China, who recognized the power in Edgeworth's formulations of Galton's ideas. Pearson lacked Galton's originality and Edgeworth's depth of understanding, but it was his zeal, with a vital assist from G. Udny Yule, that created the methodology and sold it to the world."

"I wish I could communicate to you, and especially to those of you who are just now beginning your professional careers in a world of statistics incredibly more sophisticated than that of Karl Pearson's day, something of the thrill in meeting in person and studying under a man of Pearson's immense reputation. Author of the Grammar of Science, perfector of simple linear correlations; inventor of multiple and partial correlation, of curvilinear correlation, of tetrachoric and bi- serial correlation; discoverer of the \chi^2 function for summarizing multinomial data with magnificent simplicity; builder of a beautiful system of frequency curves derived from a single differential equation which in turn harked back to the hypergeometric series; founder of ' and author or co-author of a prolific literature applying these new statistics to biological and sociological data - Karl Pearson was a hero of to an American boy vouchsafed a visit to the home of the gods. Indeed, Pearson was Thor himself - for the thunderbolts with which he attacked unsparingly those who dared oppose him were echoing and reechoing."

"Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness (...in reality, deviation from normality ...for all intents and purposes, the same thing). He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel) during... July 1902... He discovered... with a high degree of statistical significance... the runs were not purely random. ...Pearson was greatly surprised ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory."

"Even the fathers of statistical science forgot that a random series is bound to exhibit some pattern... Professor Pearson was among the first scholars interested in creating artificial random number generators, tables one could use as inputs for... simulations (precursors of our Monte Carlo simulator). ...[T]hey did not want these tables to exhibit... regularity. Yet real randomness does not look random!...A single random run is bound to exhibit some pattern ..."