Egon Sharpe Pearson was a leading figure on the world statistical scene and an honorary member of the American Statistical Association. He had been living in retirement in Sussex and, in spite of a heart condition, had been working on the history of statistics until a few months before his death in 1980.
Pearson was born in London at a time when his father, Karl Pearson, was putting forward his famous system of frequency curves. Educated at Winchester and at Trinity College, Cambridge, Egon Pearson’s initial research was in solar physics. He joined Karl Pearson’s department of applied statistics at University College London in 1921 and attended all of his father’s lecture courses. In 1922 there began the stream of important publications that soon established the younger Pearson’s reputation. When Karl Pearson retired in 1933 his department was split in two; Fisher was appointed Galton professor of eugenics and Pearson was appointed reader and then professor of statistics in 1935. With his father’s death in 1936 Pearson assumed the editorship of Biometrika, retaining it until his retirement in 1966; he continued until 1975 as editor of Biometrika auxiliary publications.
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