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{\Large BOOK REVIEW}
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SAXONY, SEXUALITY, SCIENCE, SOCIALISM AND STATISTICS
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Theodore M Porter, \textit{Karl Pearson: the scientific life in a
statistical age}, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2004.\\
Pp.\ viii, 342. \pounds22.95. ISBN 0-691-11445-5. Hardback.
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\textit{reviewed by} Peter M.\ Lee
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\textit{Wentworth College, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK.}
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\noindent
Theodore Porter has written a commendable account of an extraordinarily
energetic intellectual. In some ways the first major interests of Carl
Pearson (1857--1936) were in Germany, particularly medieval Germany (not
just Saxony, though he did love Dresden), and he was under serious
consideration for an appointment as a lecturer in German when in 1884 he
accepted the post of Professor of Applied Mathematics at University
College London (after an earlier flirtation with the bar). It was
probably his love of Germany which led him to change the spelling of his
name to Karl. Even after his adoption of mathematics as his
``official'' profession, he continued to have wide interests, and indeed
Professor Porter claims, probably with justice, that by 1889, when the
``Men's and Women's Club'' (which he had founded) dissolved, best known,
not for his writings on mathematics, but for his historical and social
writings on women.
After a pseudonymous, semi-autobiographical novel and a nineteenth
century passion play, his first publications were completions of work by
earlier authors, namely William Kingdom Clifford's \textit{The common
sense of the exact sciences} and Isaac Todhunter's \textit{A history of
the theory of elasticity \dots}. The latter was in a sense no more
than a continuation of the work Pearson had done while a student for the
mathematical tripos, but the former did help Pearson work towards the
philosophy of science he later developed in \textit{The grammar of
science}.
In its time \textit{The grammar of science} was an important book,
attracting the attention of many scientists (and of Lenin). Professor
Porter gives a careful summary of Pearson's view on the philosophy of
science. In his words, ``Valid knowledge, efficient summaries of
experience might, [Pearson] argued, be favoured by natural selection,
but untutored humans were ever being led astray by a desire for what
science could never be. The inaccessibility of science, this alienated
human condition, required that science be formulated as a self-denying
method.''
He was very much of the view that mathematics should be developed in
connection with mathematical physics and deplored the artificiality of
the old style mathematical tripos.
Over the years, he became interested in questions of inheritance and
their connections with the theory of evolution and hence came to be the
chief intellectual heir of Francis Galton (of whom he wrote an immense
biography which in the words of Stigler$^{\ref{stigler}}$, ``was a labor
of love \dots and it similarly taxes the reader'') who was one of the
early proponents of eugenics and is remembered by statisticians as the
inventor of regression and correlation. It is often forgotten that the
principal advocates of eugenics at the start of the twentieth century
were men and women of the left, and Pearson, though very much an
\'elitist, always considered himself a socialist.
Pearson spent much time teaching engineers and was much interested in
the development of graphical statics as a geometrical method of solving
practical problems. He was clear that education should not take a
narrow form, and wanted all students to know something of history and
languages. On the other hand he was clear that teaching should be done
by those with a live interest in the subject and despised writers of
textbooks. In fact his commitment to teaching was
Stakhonovite---according to his son Egon, ``In 1894 he was single-handed
and lectured eleven hours a week; in 1897 he took sixteen out of the
Department's thirty-six hours of lectures (I think the work in the
drawing office was in addition to this).''
Of course Pearson is nowadays best known as one of the founders of
modern statistical methods, and in particular for the product-moment
correlation coefficient, the $\chi^2$ test and the ``method of
moments.'' It may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with this
remarkable polymath that his statistical work as such takes up only some
fifty pages in this biography, but there is no doubt that the structure
of the biography gives a properly balanced account. It can be seen as a
natural continuation of the author's work on nineteenth century
statistics$^{\ref{porter}}$. It is not the place to look for an account
of the technicalities of Pearson's contributions to statistics, which
are covered in Stigler$^{\ref{stigler}}$ and Hald$^{\ref{hald}}$, but it
does succeed admirably in presenting Pearson in a phrase he himself
used$^{\ref{pearson}}$ ``against the changing background of
intellectual, scientific, and religious thought.'' \end{multicols}
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\textsc{Notes}
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\item\label{stigler} S.M.\ Stigler, \textit{The history of statistics:
the measurement of uncertainty before 1900}, Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press 1986.
\item T.M.\ Porter\label{porter}, \textit{The rise of statistical
thinking 1820--1900}, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
1986.
\item\label{hald} A.\ Hald, \textit{A history of mathematical
statistics from 1750 to 1930}, New York, NY, etc.: Wiley 1998.
\item\label{pearson} K.\ Pearson, \textit{The history of statistics
in the 17th and 18th senturies against the changing background of
intellectual, scientific, and religious thought}, London: Charles
Griffin 1978.
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