Letters between Karl Pearson and Vito Volterra

Abstract

Karl Pearson was born in London on 27 March 1857. He spent seven years at University College School, London, from which he withdrew for one year in 1873 owing to illness, continuing his studies with a private tutor. In 1875 he was admitted to King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics with teachers of the calibre of Edward John Routh (1831-1907), George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903), Arthur Cayley (1821-1895) and others, obtaining his Bachelor of Arts in 1879. He then moved to Germany where he studied physics and philosophy at Heidelberg and followed courses on darwinism given by Emil Du Bois Reymond (1818-1896) at Berlin. From 1880 to 1883 he studied law at London but never practised. In 1884 he joined University College, London (where he spent most of his university career) as Goldsmid professor of applied mathematics and later also as Gresham professor of geometry (from 1891 to 1894). In 1907 he was appointed director of the applied mathematics department. It was in this period that his interest became focused on the problem of the application of statistics to biology and, in particular, to inheritance and evolution, under the influence of the writings of Francis Galton (1822-1911) and his friendship with Walter F. R. Weldon (1860-1906). In 1892 he published what is probably his best known work, Grammar of Science,in which he dealt with the central problems of science philosophy, and from 1893 to 1912 he wrote a series of articles on “Mathematical Contributions to the Theory of Evolution” in which he set out his basic ideas of statistics and its applications to biological problems. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1896 and awarded the Darwin Medal in 1898.