Karl Pearson

He does not stand alone.

Many others deserve mention, and particularly W.K. Clifford and later Karl Pearson in England.

But Mach appears to have had a direct influence upon Einstein.

The problem which engaged him may be described as the application of the principles of Berkeley and Hume to the actual work which the physicist does in his scientific research.

It was statistics.

Just like Newton had invented calculus to study physics, people like Francis Galton and Carl Pearson developed modern statistics in large part to further eugenics.

Because they knew that they didn't fully understand genetics.

And we still don't.

I mean, it precedes the first unambiguous discovery by well over a century.

Indeed, this claim comes so early that it even precedes the birth of Karl Pearson, whose famous chi-square test is one of the bedrocks of statistical tests one might use nowadays to check for the validity of a detection.

In other words, Jacob's claim comes so early that modern statistics hadn't been invented yet, and Jacob was forced to look at things like the maximum and average residual after including his planet.

I think we have to give Jacob an enormous amount of credit for being so open-minded and bringing exoplanets into the forefront of astronomy.

The very nature of statistics, the very mathematical tool of statistics was invented by scientists.

Carl Pearson, who was the protege of Francis Galton, building on his mathematical tools.

And it was Francis Galton was looking to this French mathematician, who I can't remember his name, who was trying, who was looking at mountain ranges.

And he was trying to find what the ideal... like ratios of amount and range should be, it's a silly project.

Such are the hereditary delusions bred by a Syrian doctor marrying a Quaker lady from York.

Suppose Dr. Karl Pearson had said to Shelley, From what I see of your temperament, you are running great risks in forming a connection with the daughter of a fanatic and eccentric like Godwin.

Shelley would be employing the strict rationalism of the older and stronger freethinkers if he answered, From what I observe of your mind, you are rushing on destruction in marrying the great-niece of an old corpse of a courtier and dilettante like Samuel Rogers.

It is only opinion for opinion.

Nobody can pretend that either Mary Godwin or Samuel Rogers was mad, and the general view a man may hold about the healthiness of inheriting their blood or type is simply the same sort of general view by which men do marry for love or liking.

There is no reason to suppose that Dr. Karl Pearson is any better judge of a bridegroom than the bridegroom is of a bride.

An objection may be anticipated here, but it is very easily answered.

It may be said that we do, in fact, call in medical specialists to settle whether a man is mad, and that these specialists go by technical and even secret tests that cannot be known to the mass of men.

As a wealthy child of a wealthy family in the Victorian era, he had grown up extremely conservative, and this colored his interpretations of all he saw.

His biographer, Michael Burl- Bulmer, describes him as having little sympathy for liberal causes, like Chartism.

The Chartist movement was a working class attempt to reform UK politics that was active from 1838 to the late 1840s.

It was a-... kind of proto-socialist-y, right?

Galton spent years in North Africa and the Middle East sowing his wild oats, in his own words.

There is evidence that during this period he did things that later ashamed him.

His biographers will note that almost none of his letters survive from the years right before, right after his dad died.

Uh, his first biographer, Karl Pearson, calls this period of his life the fallow years of his life, because there's n- we don't have anything to know about them, right? 'Cause he, it, you're kind of led to believe he destroyed the letters he sent home.

He talked about selective breeding to improve the human race.

He had Carl Pearson, University College London, another one.

He wanted to use biometric data to promote what he called aggressive racial hygiene, Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

So you have all of this stuff.

The heaviest, perfectly healthy brain was that of a mechanic which weighed just above 70 ounces.

In the Journal of the Biometrical Society, June 1905, Professor Carl Pearson, FRS, and Dr. Raymond Pearl give the results of an analysis of 2,100 adult male and 1,034 adult female brain weights belonging to five races, Swedish, Bavarian, Hessian, Bohemian, and English, with the conclusion that, quote, there is no evidence that brain weight is sensibly correlated with intellectual ability.

Of the five races investigated by the biometricians, the English have the smallest mean brain weight.

The mean of the adult Englishman is 27 grams less than the Bavarian mean, 57 grams less than the Hessian mean, 65 grams less than the Swedish mean, and 120 grams less than the Bohemian mean, unquote.

Pascal and Fermat and Bayes and Laplace, who set the stage for computing advanced probability and probability theory.

And then good old Carl Pearson came along and had the chi-squared goodness of fit test that introduced the first notion of what did we observe and what did we expect.

And

that's the core of all of our hypothesis tests, right? That there is something that we expect based on a particular theory, and there is something that we observe in the data, and everything we do is about assessing how well those two things fit.

Yeah.

But who then trots out on the field to

complicate things? Well, two people trot out onto the field together, right? There's Naaman and Pearson Jr., Pearson's boy, Egon.

And so we get Naaman and Pearson who round out things that Fisher had by thinking about things more formally in terms of errors and an explicit alternative hypothesis, right? Exactly.