
Francis Galton (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911) was an English polymath who produced over 340 papers and books, creating the statistical concept of correlation, the use of questionnaries and surveys for collecting data on human communities, and pioneering the Eugenics movement.
Biography[]
Francis Galto was born in Birmingham, West Midlands, England in 1822, the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. He was a child prodigy, reading by the age of two, knowing Greek, Latin, and long division by the age of five, and moving on to adult books by the age of six. In 1850, he joined the Royal Geographic Society, and he became known as a polymath. He was a major figure in the fields of statistics, genealogy, biography, and eugenics, coining the term "nurture versus nature". Combining statistics with science, he took measurements of just about every human trait one could think of and found that for many of these traits like height, weight, and intelligence and found that they fit into a bell-shaped curve. He also found the optimal method for making tea, psychometrics, and meteorology, inventing the first weather map. He died in 1911.