Francis Galton
British statistician and the well-known (notorious) founder of Eugenics. His interests in heredity and statistics led him to discoveries in statistics on the one hand, and to the dangerous idea of "improving" mankind on the other. It must be remembered, however, that eugenic ideas became a national policy in many countries and supported by many respectable persons, not only in Hitler's Germany, the worst example; and these ideas are still at issue in the contemorary world, overtly (in some countries) or covertly (in many other countries).
In the 1870s, Galton discovered, by means of the mechanical device called "quincunx" that a mixture of normal distributions is itself a normal distribution. Following this, by experiments on sweetpeas and investigations on human heights, he discovered the notions of regression and statistical correlation. He founded the school of biometry, and had a great impact on the development of statistics, as well as on the discipline of genetics.
(For more on Galton, see Biographical Notes)
