Torn between the demonic and rational

The prospect of reading the biography of a statistician may sound unappealing because it might be assumed that statisticians are as dry as their subject is thought to be. Not so, as Theodore Porter's well-written and insightful study demonstrates. The life of Karl Pearson was colourful and riven by many competing psychological demands. Indeed, Pearson possessed an inner dynamic that propelled him from one extreme to another. He threw himself obsessively into every project in which he engaged. His was a disturbed life and one that defies the usual linearity of a biographical narrative. Thus Porter has adopted a thematic approach that allows him to explore the projects Pearson pursued.

The book's jacket shows a middle-aged Pearson with a sardonic smile bent over a Brunsviga calculating machine and surrounded by photographs of the human skulls he measured and computed. He resembles an able technician undertaking biometric analyses and seeking the objective truth contained in the data. While this was his preferred public persona by the start of the 20th century, his intellectual odyssey had taken him in many different directions. As a student at Cambridge University, he had become infatuated with the literature, poetry and idealist philosophy of Germany, and after graduation, he had studied in Heidelberg and in Berlin. This passion led to his first book, The New Werther (1880), which was written under the pseudonym "Loki" and reflected his spiritual search for the key to life's meaning. Two years later, Pearson published anonymously a passion play inspired by his socialist vision, through which he expressed his concerns about contemporary society and religion.

As in other areas, Pearson's views on religion oscillated alarmingly. During his student days, he experienced severe religious doubts and increasingly aligned himself with other scientifically educated agnostics. Yet, while highly critical of Christianity as a system of belief, he sometimes expressed his deep admiration for Catholicism, especially for its historical role as a benign social force.

His efforts to help establish the progressive Men and Women's Club, through which he met his future wife, was an expression of his socialist concern regarding the place of women in society. But his relationships with females were often strained because he attempted to suppress his uncertain emotional responses by over-intellectualising his views about women. Thus one female member of the club described him as "more impersonal than any one I know". While pursuing his intellectual enthusiasms, Pearson also had to earn a living. Thus, with considerable reluctance, he followed his father's wish that he should study law, proceeding as far as entry to Lincoln's Inn and being called to the Bar. Yet he side-stepped this career and transformed himself in the early 1880s into a cultural historian, giving lectures at Cambridge and the South Place Ethical Society. Then in 1884 he underwent another transformation, becoming the Goldsmid professor of applied mathematics and mechanics at University College London, where he developed his renowned research programme in statistics.

Despite his enthusiasm for science, Pearson repeatedly subjected it to criticism. On occasions, he conceived the factual and empirical aspects of science to be sterile and threatening to the self; on others he recoiled from the more speculative forms of theorising with the moral indignation of a Puritan. Yet he found a haven in statistics that seems to have resonated with his drive to suppress the more personal sides of his character.

Porter has provided historians with important insights into Pearson's fascinating and complex character, driven alternatively by rationalistic and demonic forces. As he notes, Pearson "lived to a remarkable degree on the border between truth and fiction, revelation and disguise, identity and plurality".

Geoffrey Cantor is professor of the history of science, Leeds University.