Portrait of Karl Pearson

Birthday profile

Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson, English mathematician, eugenicist, and academic (died 1936)

Born
March 27, 1857
Died
April 27, 1936
Zodiac sign
Aries
Birth year
1857

About Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson was an English biostatistician and mathematician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics and meteorology. Pearson was also a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, and his thought is an example of what is today described as scientific racism. Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He edited and completed both William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885) and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity, Vol. 1 (1886–1893) and Vol. 2 (1893), following their deaths. Pearson was the first holder of this chair—the Galton Chair of Eugenics, later the Galton Chair of Genetics—in accordance with Galton's wishes.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Career and life highlights

The world when Karl Pearson was born

Karl Pearson was born in 1857. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Headlines and milestones

  • Top headlineDred Scott decision — Supreme Court denies Black citizenship
  • Technology milestoneFirst passenger elevator installed (NYC)
  • World population~1.37B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderJames Buchanan
  • U.S. population27.8M

1857 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Karl Pearson's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure18572026
Population27.8M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.