Egon Pearson

Egon Sharpe Pearson (Hampstead, 11 August 1895 – London, 12 June 1980) was the only son of Karl Pearson, and like his father, a leading British statistician. He went to Winchester School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and succeeded his father as professor of statistics at University College London and as editor of the journal Biometrika. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society 1955–56. Pearson is best known for development of the Neyman-Pearson lemma of statistical hypothesis testing.

On 31 August 1934 Egon Pearson had married (Dorothy) Eileen (1901/2–1949), younger daughter of Russell Jolly, solicitor; they had two daughters. It was a great personal loss when his wife died from pneumonia in 1949, though he kept on their Hampstead house with the aid of a housekeeper, until 1967 when he moved to Cambridge after marrying (on 11 January) Margaret Theodosia (1896/7–1975), widow of Laurence Beddome Turner, reader emeritus in engineering, Cambridge, and second daughter of George Frederick Ebenezer Scott, architect, and Mrs Bernard Turner, of Godstowe School, High Wycombe.

Works

• On the Use and Interpretation of certain Test Criteria for the Purposes of Statistical Inference (coauthor Jerzy Neyman in Biometrika, 1928)
• The History of statistics in the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries (1929). Commented version of a series of conference by his father.
• On the Problem of the Most Efficient Tests of Statistical Hypotheses (coauthor Jerzy Neyman, 1933)
• Karl Pearson : an appreciation of some aspects of his life and work (1938)
• Selected papers (1966)
• Studies in the history of statistics and probability (1969, coauthor Maurice George Kendall)

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Egon Pearson", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
• Obituary by H. A. David
• Egon Pearson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project