Raphael Weldon
Walter Frank Raphael Weldon | |
---|---|
Oxford University | |
Academic advisors | Francis Maitland Balfour |
Walter Frank Raphael Weldon
.Family
Weldon was the second child of the journalist and industrial chemist, Walter Weldon, and his wife Anne Cotton. On 13 March 1883, Weldon married Florence Tebb (1858–1936), daughter of the social reformer William Tebb.
Life and education
Medicine was his intended career and he spent the academic year 1876-1877 at
There Weldon studied with the developmental morphologist
On his religious views, he considered himself an agnostic.[2] He died in 1906 of acute pneumonia, and is buried at Holywell Church, Oxford.
Career
Upon returning to Cambridge in 1882, he was appointed university lecturer in Invertebrate Morphology. Weldon's work was centred on the development of a fuller understanding of marine biological phenomena and selective death rates of these organisms.
In 1889 Weldon succeeded Lankester in the Jodrell Chair of Zoology at
His interests were changing from morphology to problems in variation and organic correlation. He began using the statistical techniques that
Weldon was one of the first scientists to provide evidence of stabilizing and directional selection in natural populations.[6]
By 1893 a Royal Society Committee included Weldon, Galton and Karl Pearson 'For the Purpose of conducting Statistical Enquiry into the Variability of Organisms'. In an 1894 paper Some remarks on variation in plants and animals arising from the work of the Royal Society Committee, Weldon wrote:
- "... the questions raised by the Darwinian hypothesis are purely statistical, and the statistical method is the only one at present obvious by which that hypothesis can be experimentally checked."
In 1900 the work of
After his death, the Weldon Memorial Prize was established by the University of Oxford in his honour; it is awarded annually.
Weldon's dice
In 1894, Weldon rolled a set of 12 dice 26,306 times.[8] He collected the data in part, 'to judge whether the differences between a series of group frequencies and a theoretical law, taken as a whole, were or were not more than might be attributed to the chance fluctuations of random sampling.' Weldon's dice data were used by Karl Pearson[9] in his pioneering paper on the chi-squared statistic.
Notes
- ^ "Weldon, Walter Frank Raphael (WLDN878WF)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
- ISBN 9781107601222.
He was through the many years the present writer knew him, like his hero Huxley, a confirmed Agnostic.
- ^ Bourne, Gilbert Charles. "Weldon Walter Frank Raphael". Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 Supplement. 3.
- ^ "On the Origin of Our Specimens: The Weldon Years | UCL Museums & Collections Blog". blogs.ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 November 2017.
- ^ Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900–1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 5.
- ^ Amitabh, Joshi. (2017). Weldon's Search for a Direct Proof of Natural Selection and the Tortuous Path to the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis. Resonance 22 (6): 525-548.
- ^ W.B. Provine (1971). The origins of theoretical population genetics. University of Chicago Press.
- ^ Kemp, A.W., and C.D. Kemp. (1991). Weldon's dice data revisited, The American Statistician, 45(3):216–222. doi:10.2307/2684294
- ^ Pearson, Karl (1900). On the criterion that a given system of derivations from the probable in the case of a correlated system of variables is such that it can be reasonably supposed to have arisen from random sampling. Philosophical Magazine, 5(50), 157–175.
References
- ISBN 978-1-107-60122-2.
- W.B. Provine(1971) The origins of theoretical population genetics. University of Chicago Press.
- Magnello E. 2001. Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, in Statisticians of the Centuries (eds C.C. Heyde and E. Seneta) p261-264. New York: Springer.
- Shipley A.E. 1908. Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. Proc Roy Soc Series B 1908 vol 80 pxxv-xli.
External links
- Works by or about Raphael Weldon at Internet Archive
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Raphael Weldon", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- Bourne, Gilbert Charles (1912). Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). Vol. 3. London: Smith, Elder & Co. p. 629-631. . In
- "On Certain Correlated Variations in Carcinus moenas" Proceedings of the Royal Society, 54, (1893), 318–329. An example of Weldon's use of statistical methods
- Photograph of Weldon on the Portraits of Statisticians page.
- "Archival material relating to Raphael Weldon". UK National Archives.