Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson was an English biostatistician and mathematician, 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. Born in Islington, London, into a Quaker family, he studied mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1879 as Third Wrangler, and then studied in Germany at Heidelberg and Berlin. He was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton, and after their deaths he edited and completed William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity. He was also a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, views now described as scientific racism.