Karl Pearson and his first memory
[The first thing Pearson could remember] was sitting in a high chair sucking his thumb. Someone told him to stop sucking it, and added that unless he did so, the thumb would wither away. He put his two thumbs together and looked at them for a long time. They look alike to me, he said to himself. I cant see that the thumb I suck is any smaller than the other. I wonder if she could be lying to me. Here in this simple story we have rejection of constituted authority, faith in his own interpretation of the meaning of observed data, and finally, imputation of moral obliquity to a person whose judgement differed from his own. These characteristics were prominent throughout his entire career. Walker (1958 & -78)
Science, Vol 304, Issue 5678, 1747-1748 , 18 June 2004
Here
HISTORY OF SCIENCE:
Tragedy Averted
A review by Manfred D. Laubichler*
Karl Pearson The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age
by Theodore M. Porter
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2004. 352 pp. $35, £22.95. ISBN 0-691-11445-5
George Bernard Shaw declared Pearson´s life a tragedy, referring to the statistician´s successful academic career. The career that Pearson himself, near the end of his life, pronounced a failure was soon to be reduced to the name of a mathematical symbol and stripped of all its wide-ranging ambitions, intellectual struggles, and inherent contradictions. It is not without irony that Pearson, who devoted more than 40 years to the project of modern statistics, feared most of all the unrelenting consequences of his own creation–namely that in a future age characterized by universal quantification there would be no room to remember the intricate details of an individual life. This would have been for Pearson, as heir to Dr. Frankenstein and Goethe´s Faust, the real tragedy, to be devoured by his own creation.