Department Colloquium: Jemma Lorenat

Abstract

Some time around the turn of the twentieth century mathematical statistics became a discipline with recognized techniques, institutions, and training centered at Karl Pearson’s laboratory in London.

My talk concentrates on this period of crystallization in the contrasting professional trajectories and contributions of Alice Lee and Charles Davenport. Lee was one of the two students who attended Pearson’s first lectures on frequency curve fitting and correlation in the 1890s.

She soon began gathering and analyzing data on projects ranging from anthropometry to barometric pressure to Hertzian oscillation. In 1899 she earned a doctorate in “Employment of the Theory of Correlation on Biological and Other Investigations” from University College London. Over this same period, Davenport endeavored to import the new British tools for American biologists. He taught statistical research to prospective zoologists at Harvard and the University of Chicago, published a textbook, and successfully lobbied the Carnegie Institute of Washington to fund a biometric station in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

When Pearson and W. F. R. Weldon founded the journal Biometrika in 1901, Davenport featured on the editorial board. These complementary trajectories shifted in the following decade. If Lee and Davenport appear in histories of statistics, they are lesser satellites of Pearson — the former a diligent computer, the latter an antagonistic Mendelian. Following Lee and Davenport between their nineteenth and twentieth century situations uncovers modes of statistical work that disappeared with disciplinization.