Egon Pearson

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Egon Sharpe Pearson (11 August 1895 – 12 June 1980) was a British statistician and the son of Karl Pearson. He studied at Winchester College and Trinity College, Cambridge, and later took over his father’s roles at University College London as professor of statistics and editor of Biometrika. He is best known for the Neyman–Pearson lemma, a foundational result in statistical hypothesis testing.

Pearson received many honors: Fellow of the Econometric Society (1948), President of the Royal Statistical Society (1955–56), and its Guy Medal in Gold (1955). He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1946 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1966. His Royal Society citation noted his work on likelihood ratio methods and the use of statistics in industry and war-related testing.

Personal life: He married Eileen Jolly in 1934; they had two daughters, Judith and Sarah. Eileen died in 1949. He married Margaret Theodosia Scott in 1967; she died in 1975. Pearson lived in Cambridge for a time, then moved to West Lavington, Sussex, where he lived until his death in 1980.

University College London holds Pearson’s archive, including lecture notes and papers related to Biometrika.