Karl Pearson: Lives of a Statistician

卡尔·皮尔逊：统计学家的一生

• 批准号: 0080104
• 负责人: Theodore Porter
• 金额: $ 8万
• 依托单位: University of California-Los Angeles
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2000
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2000-08-01 至 2003-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0080104&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Karl; Pearson; Lives; Statistician

SES 00-80104 - Theodore Porter (UCLA) - "Karl Pearson: Lives of a Statistician"This award supports a study of the early career of Karl Pearson, founder of the biometric school that worked out the modern methods of statistics. Pearson did not take up statistics until about 1892, when he was 35 years old. Before that he worked at a remarkable variety of topics and causes, including German religious history, history of philosophy, feminism, socialism, and the ethical value and cultural significance of science. He also wrote a romantic novel and a "nineteenth-century passion play." In many ways his early beliefs and values seem at odds with his later advocacy of statistics in almost every domain of inquiry. As a young man he wrote movingly of his desire to know nature directly, in contrast to the putative superficiality of quantitative knowledge. Yet his career displays striking continuities as well, above all in his lifelong opposition to individualism. This was expressed early in a strong moral commitment to socialism and an impulse to dissolve the self in nature. In his later writing, he exalted the rigors of scientific method as a vehicle for taming the individual and creating citizens.This work is also about objectivity, considered not mainly as a set of public, intellectual values, but rather from the standpoint of the internal life of the scientist. For Pearson, statistics was a strategy of self-discipline and renunciation. By giving up the impulse to know nature directly, he was able to define science in terms of method rather than subject matter, and in this way to universalize its claims. Pearson's early professional life provides the historian an unusual opportunity to integrate the private life with the research commitments of a mathematical scientist, and to show something of the sacrifice as well as satisfaction in fashioning a life of exact science. This work should be of interest not only to historians, but also to anyone concerned about the role of science in modern culture, or about patterns of recruitment into science according to intellectual and religious values, social class, ethnicity, and gender.

SES 00 - 80104-西奥多波特（加州大学洛杉矶分校）-"卡尔皮尔逊：一个统计学家的生活"这个奖项支持卡尔皮尔逊，生物识别学校的创始人，制定了现代统计方法的早期职业生涯的研究。皮尔逊没有采取统计，直到1892年，当他35岁。在此之前，他致力于各种各样的主题和事业，包括德国宗教史，哲学史，女权主义，社会主义以及科学的伦理价值和文化意义。他还写了一部浪漫小说和一部"十九世纪的激情戏"。在许多方面，他早期的信仰和价值观似乎与他后来在几乎每个调查领域倡导的统计数据不一致。作为一个年轻人，他感人地写下了他直接了解自然的愿望，与定量知识的假定肤浅形成对比。然而，他的职业生涯也表现出惊人的连续性，最重要的是他一生都反对个人主义。这一点在早期就表现为对社会主义的强烈道德承诺和在自然中溶解自我的冲动。在他后期的作品中，他推崇科学方法的严谨性，认为它是驯服个体和创造公民的工具。这部作品也是关于客观性的，主要不是作为一套公共的、知识分子的价值观，而是从科学家内心生活的角度来考虑。对皮尔森来说，统计学是一种自律和放弃的策略。通过放弃直接了解自然的冲动，他能够根据方法而不是主题来定义科学，并以这种方式使其主张普遍化。皮尔森的早期职业生涯提供了历史学家一个不寻常的机会，结合私人生活的研究承诺的数学科学家，并显示一些牺牲以及满意的塑造生活的精确科学。这项工作不仅应该引起历史学家的兴趣，而且应该引起任何关心科学在现代文化中的作用，或者根据知识和宗教价值观，社会阶级，种族和性别招募科学的模式的人的兴趣。