Francis Galton

Francis Galton (1822–1911) was an English polymath whose studies of heredity and human variation helped develop statistical methods and fingerprint classification. He also founded eugenics.

Correlation: A statistical measure describing the direction and strength of association between variables. Galton introduced the term and developed ways to quantify resemblance between related measurements.
Fingerprint: A pattern of ridges on a fingertip that is distinctive and persistent over a person’s life. Galton studied fingerprint patterns and argued for their use in identifying individuals.
Eugenics: A movement seeking to alter the hereditary composition of human populations through reproduction policies. Galton coined the term and advocated improving inherited human qualities through selective breeding.
Charles Darwin: An English naturalist who formulated evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s theory of evolution prompted Galton to investigate inheritance and variation.
Regression toward the mean: The tendency for an extreme measurement to be followed by one closer to the population average. Galton identified this pattern while comparing parents’ heights with their children’s.
Fingerprint classification: The organization of fingerprints into pattern categories for systematic comparison and retrieval. Galton’s system helped make fingerprint records usable for identification.
Heritability: A population statistic estimating how much observed variation in a trait is associated with genetic differences. Galton’s family studies helped make inherited resemblance a central scientific question.
Victorian era: The period of Queen Victoria’s reign in Britain, from 1837 to 1901. Galton’s career unfolded amid Victorian faith in measurement, progress, and social hierarchy.
Standard deviation: A measure of how widely values in a dataset vary around their mean. Galton used the normal distribution and measures of spread to study variation.
Anthropometry: The measurement of the dimensions and proportions of the human body. Galton collected bodily measurements to investigate human differences and heredity.

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