Francis Galton
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 Francis Galton |
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| Born | February 16 1822 Birmingham, England |
|---|---|
| Died | January 17 1911 (aged 88) Haslemere, Surrey, England |
| Residence | England |
| Nationality | British |
| Field | Anthropologist and polymath |
| Institutions | Meteorological Council Royal Geographical Society |
| Alma mater | King's College London Cambridge University |
| Academic advisor | William Hopkins |
| Notable students | Karl Pearson |
| Known for | Eugenics The Galton board |
| Notable prizes | Copley medal (1910) |
Sir Francis Galton F.R.S. (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian scientist. He was a polymath, an anthropologist, an eugenicist, a tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted in 1909.
Galton had was very intelligent. He produced over 340 papers and books throughout his lifetime. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence. He also introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys to collect data on human communities. He needed such data for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies. He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the very term itself and the phrase "nature versus nurture". As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology. He created a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. As the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map, proposed a theory of anticyclones, and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale.[1] He also invented the Galton Whistle for testing differential hearing ability.
