The Chair in Eugenics founded at UCL by Galton was first held by Karl Pearson, who founded the college’s Department of Applied Statistics. He continued to explore the ideas of regression and correlation with, for example, George Udny Yule also then at UCL. Among Pearson’s other contributions were both the introduction of the chi-squared test and the method of moments.
Pearson was born at 10 Albion Rd (now renamed Furlong Road), off Holloway Road, Islington in north London. A blue plaque can be found on his house at 7 Well Road, Hampstead.
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