Egon Pearson

Egon Sharpe Pearson (11 August 1895 – 12 June 1980) was an English mathematician and statistician. He was one of three children of Karl Pearson and Maria, née Sharpe.

Career Pearson was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Cambridge, and succeeded his father as professor of statistics at University College London and as editor of the journal Biometrika. He is best known for development of the Neyman–Pearson lemma of statistical hypothesis testing. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1948.

Pearson was President of the Royal Statistical Society in 1955–56, and was awarded its Guy Medal in gold in 1955. He was appointed a CBE in 1946.

Pearson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1966. His candidacy citation read:

Known throughout the world as co-author of the Neyman–Pearson theory of testing statistical hypotheses, and responsible for many important contributions to problems of statistical inference and methodology, especially in the development and use of the likelihood ratio criterion. Has played a leading role in furthering the applications of statistical methods — for example, in industry, and also during and since the war, in the assessment and testing of weapons. Karl Pearson : an appreciation of some aspects of his life and work (1938)

Studies in the history of statistics and probability (1969, coauthor Maurice George Kendall)

Collections University College London holds the archive of Pearson, which was acquired in four separate accessions between 1980 and 2013. The collection includes material relating to Pearson's professional life such as lecture notes, draft publications, correspondence and papers relating to the Biometrika journal.