‘Pearson’s coefficient’ is as good an epitaph as any carved in stone but certainly not as much as he would have liked, since he was a man who constantly rebuilt a storybook self for his own immediate support. Borderline Asberger’s syndrome springs to mind but this covers every nineteenth and twentieth century geek that has been involved in frontier science.

Ho Hum! Do all undergraduates suffer the same socialist angst? He was bright and afraid of being a dilettante, which he was, and he was supported in this belief until his mid-thirties by an indulgent father and a doting mother. Mentally he was not up to his friends G B Shaw and J B S Haldane, knew it and after many false starts carved his immortality in applied mathematics and specifically statistics.

I had forgotten that he was of the same generation as my grandfather when Malthus and Darwin excited the reading peasantry as never before and induced a rebellious atheism that fostered putting Man in God’s place but feeling guilty about it. Marx too was not yet a hack.

He still remained wistful of the certainties and emotional pomp of the Roman Catholic Church although never of that faith. His Christianity crashed in 1877 but not its moral content. For long he lingered in Pantheism and found the role of woman difficult. This last led him to meet and frequently fall in love with Difficult Women. Cerebral contact alone did not really help. He was not a man to live by faith but only facts meant anything to him. He could not and never did turn his back upon intelligent ladies.

Germany became his first great love because of their powers of organising and he despised British governance because it was dominated by classical scholars and not wide-thinking scientific minds (like himself). Bradshaw, a University of Cambridge librarian in the 1880s, said that Pearson was ‘one of those who go at the truth because they cannot help it’.

For him it was either that or suicide, and he was normally depressed, renouncing love, the hypocrisy of the Victorians and even his own socialism. He was not a ‘joiner’.

The Victorian era needed the elevation of engineering to a science and that applied to mathematics which was his best stable. He used all science to support his ideas and luckily in 1900 fell into eugenics, practically worshipping Galton. Graphs became his aim and his delight. Psychometrics of all sorts drove him and although he fought the equally headstrong R A Fisher in 1920 he really cleared the field for effective work on human genetics. At times he went over the top but that was enthusiasm.

This is the definitive book on Pearson but could be reduced by half.

Patrick James