Pearson Square

timbrophy

The Pearson square is a method used in the agricultural field to calculate the amount of nutrients required to achieve a certain proportion (of, say Protein etc.).

Does anyone know where it started or who Pearson was?

Help appreciated.

Tim

alan4cult

Perhaps this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Pearson
He's the only Pearson I now from statistics.

timbrophy

I don't believe that it could Karl Pearson. He is much too high-level a mathematician to be dealing with handy ways of working out percentages. I suspect that it was an agricultural instructor somewhere who hit on this method of helping farmers, especially in 3rd world countries, to work out nutrition rations. Now it seems to used in wine making, ice cream making, agriculture and even working out how to get the correct hardness of water in fish breeding. Pearson seems to have given more practical help to millions of people than most of us involved in Maths. That is why I would like to give a correct attribution to the method.

We are working in UL at trying to produce short pamphlets to show the relevance of Maths in ordinary life.

Thanks for trying,

Tim

hivizman

You have probably done the same searches as I have, but the earliest reference I've found so far to "Pearson's square method" is in a paper in the Journal of Dairy Science by H. H. Sommer "Methods of Calculating Ice Cream Mixes" (1921) - Vol. 4, No. 5, pp. 401-415. I thought I'd struck lucky with a reference to David Pearson The Chemical Analysis of Foods (7th ed. 1976), but David Pearson was born only in 1919, and I can't find any family connection with Karl Pearson.

I wouldn't want to rule Karl Pearson out immediately, because statistics was much more practical and mundane when he was one of the leaders (remember, Gosset, who developed the t-statistic, worked for Guinness). I've got a copy of Theodore M Porter's The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820-1900, which has extensive references to Pearson, and I'll see if this has any clues.

hivizman

I'd forgotten, but Ted Porter actually wrote a biography of Karl Pearson:

Theodore M. Porter, Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ (2004), ISBN 0-691-11445-5, 352 pp.

If you can get hold of a copy, this could resolve the issue. Alternatively, there are extracts on Google books.

hivizman

I followed up on Karl Pearson, and found an annotated bibliography of his scholarly works published by Cambridge University Press in 1939 (Pearson died in 1936). However, there was no mention of Pearson's Square Method.

However, I found in another place a reference to F. A Pearson, in the Dairy Husbandry Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana. He had a paper "Milk Prices and the Cost of Milk Production" in Journal of Dairy Science Vol. 3, No. 3, 1920. This doesn't mention Pearson's Square, but I suspect that this is your man.

timbrophy

Thanks for all the help. I will look into Karl Pearson in more detail.

Tim

Ostrom

Interesting, Fischer was an ag scientist also wasn't he?