(1822–1911; b. Birmingham, England; d. Haslemere, England) English doctor, explorer, meteorologist, biometrician, and statistician. Galton was a first cousin of Charles Darwin, the author of The Origin of Species. Galton studied medicine at Cambridge U. On coming into money, he abandoned this career and spent the period 1850–2 exploring Africa; he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in recognition of his achievements. In the 1860s he turned to meteorology and devised an early form of the weather maps used by modern meteorologists. He coined the term 'anticyclone'. Subsequently, perhaps inspired by Darwin's work, he turned to inheritance and the relationships between the characteristics of successive generations. In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius he used the term correlation in its statistical sense. His best-known work, published in 1889, was entitled Natural Inheritance. He made great use of the normal distribution and illustrated it in a lecture to the Royal Institution in 1874 using a quincunx. He is quoted as saying 'Whenever you can, count'. He was elected FRS in 1860.

A Dictionary of Statistics. Second edition revised. Copyright © Oxford University Press, 2008. All rights reserved.