Egon Pearson – Wikipedia

Egon Sharpe Pearson (Hampstead, 11 August 1895 – Midhurst, 12 June 1980) was a British statistical.
It was an important statistician, son of the most famous statistical statistical Karl Pearson and Maria Sharpe, with a three -year -old sister older (Sigrid Loetitia) and one of three minor years (Helga Sharpe).

Attend first the Dragon School Oxford (from 1907 to 1909) and then the Winchester College, where he obtained the graduate in 1914.
In 1914, due to health problems (also in the heart) he avoids the recruitment for the First World War, and the study of mathematics at Trinity College of Cambridge ; Due to an influence he cannot study until the end of the academic year.
After this first year he leaves Trinity College to work on the admiralty and the Ministry of Navigation.
In 1919, obtained the first degree , is interested in astronomy and in particular of solar physics, but then addresses the statistics following the frequency of courses on errors’ theory.
Since 1921 he worked at the Department of Applied Statistics of the University College London (Department founded by his father in 1911).
In 1924 he became assistant editor Of Biometric .
1925 is the turning point, as thanks to Rockefeller Research Fellowship For the years 1925-1927 Jerzy Neyman takes the first year at the Department of Applied Statistics (the second in Paris), and the friendship between Egon Pearson and Jerzy Neyman begins. In the same period he began to have epistolary exchanges with William Sealy Gosset.
Thanks also to these important contacts develops with Neyman between 1926 and 1933 the approach called “Neyman-Pearson” (with the publication of On the Problem of the Most Efficient Tests of Statistical Hypotheses in 1933).
His contributions within the Statistical robustness They are influenced by correspondence with Gosset, and facilitated by the simulations made possible by the tables of random numbers published by Tipett between 1925 and 1927.

In 1931 he visited the United States and held courses in Iowa, as well as discussing with Walter A. Shewhart of quality control; stimuli that will lead him to found the Industrial and Agricultural Research Section from the Royal Statistical Society .

He played an important role in research applied to agriculture and industry; contributed significantly to the activity of the British Standards Institution, as well as to the development of the use of quality control; He became one of the founders of the British operational research company (1948).

In 1934 he married Eileen, with whom he will have two daughters.

After the death of his father (in 1936) he revised his statistics tables ( Tables for Statisticians and Biometricians , from 1914), a very demanding work that began together with H.O.Hartley, and which will see the first volume published only in 1954 and the second in 1972.
The new family commitments and the death of his father partially distance Egon Pearson from research.
During the Second World War he works for the Ordinance Board for the statistical analysis of data regarding damage to war aircraft and similar issues.
The work environment clearly improves when in 1943 Ronald Fisher leaves the institution (to go to Cambridge), and thus mitigate the tensions related to the fact that R. A. Fisher was bitter opponent of his father Karl Pearson.
In 1949 his wife died of pneumonia, hitting him strongly in feelings.
He became director of the statistics department at the University College in London, a position he maintained until 1961. managing editor Of Biometric in 1966.

• On the Use and Interpretation of certain Test Criteria for the Purposes of Statistical Inference (Coautore Jerzy Neyman in Biometrika, 1928)
• The History of statistics in the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries (1929). Commented version of a cycle of conferences by his father
• On the Problem of the Most Efficient Tests of Statistical Hypotheses (Coautore 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, co -author Maurice George Kendall)