Egon Pearson (1885-1980)

Son of Karl Pearson (1857-1936), he had a very different personality from his father. He was polite and modest and meticulous with calculations. In his lectures, he was hesitant but explained clearly using examples. Like his father, he used geometrical representations to teach as well as explanations of the history of the topics. He followed in his father's footsteps in many ways. He studied mathematics at Winchester College and then at Trinity College Cambridge. After completing his studies, he was hired to work at University College London, employed in the same department as his father. He worked there for the rest of his career except for a hiatus to work in the Ministry of Supply during wartime.

Egon Pearson also took over for his father as editor of Biometrika in 1936. Under both their stewardships, a significant feature of the journal was publishing data tables which involved intensive calculations and a focus on the history of probability and statistics including a series of historical papers running in the journal. After Karl's death, Egon published a memoir of his father with an edition of Karl's lectures on The History of Statistics in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

Outside of teaching and publishing, he contributed to the development of statistics in a few major ways. He met Jerzy Neyman in 1925 and corresponded with him about the ideas Fisher had discussed regarding estimation theory and significance testing. They formed the Neyman-Pearson theory which differed from Fisher's theory because of their emphasis on including an alternative hypothesis and a calculation of the power of a test. They wrote the Neyman-Pearson lemma which focuses on using the likelihood ratio to find the most powerful test. Their work enabled Neyman to later develop confidence intervals.

Egon Pearson and his students also approximated sampling distributions under the null and alternative hypotheses. Though often not remembered for major contributions to statistics completed on his own, Pearson contributed to many advancements in statistics whether by mentoring students in their contributions, consulting with Neyman, or editing and publishing works in Biometrika.