Arthur Black (mathematician)

Arthur Black (1851–1893) was an English mathematician. He killed himself and his wife and son. His daughter survived.

Life

He was the eldest son of David Black of Brighton, a solicitor and coroner, and brother to Clementina Black, the social reformer and author Constance Garnett and Grace Human.^[1] He became a student of William Clifford at University College London.^[2] He was in a business partnership with the lawyer Robert Singleton Garnett, elder brother to Edward Garnett.^[3][4] In 1893 he killed his wife, son and himself.^[5] His daughter Gertrude Speedwell Black (1887–1963) survived, and married H. J. Massingham.^[6][7]

Black's work remained unpublished at the time of his suicide. Micaiah John Muller Hill saw to the publication of a paper on a general Gaussian integral.^[8] Notebooks survive, including attempts to formulate a quantitative theory of evolution; they also contain a derivation of the chi-squared distribution.^[2][9] A long manuscript, Algebra of Animal Evolution, was sent to Karl Pearson, who then transmitted it to Francis Galton; it is now lost.^[9] Pearson and Walter Frank Raphael Weldon thought highly of the work, but Galton had reservations.^[10]

References

• Donald A. MacKenzie, Studies in the History of Probability and Statistics. XXXVI Arthur Black: A Forgotten Pioneer of Mathematical Statistics, Biometrika Vol. 64, No. 3 (Dec., 1977), pp. 613–616. Published by: Biometrika Trust. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2345340

Notes

1. MacKenzie, p. 613.
2. "aim25.ac.uk, Black (Arthur) Notebooks". Archived from the original on 11 May 2008. Retrieved 30 December 2006.
3. Roger W. Peattie (1 November 2010). Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti. Penn State Press. p. 655 note 1. ISBN 978-0-271-04424-8. Retrieved 1 April 2013.
4. Joseph Conrad (20 December 2007). The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Cambridge University Press. p. xxxvii. ISBN 978-0-521-88189-0. Retrieved 1 April 2013.
5. David Trotter (2001). Paranoid modernism. Oxford University Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-19-818755-4. Retrieved 1 April 2013.
6. D. H. Lawrence (28 November 2002). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge University Press. p. 121. ISBN 978-0-521-00700-9. Retrieved 1 April 2013.
7. Chase, Malcolm. "Massingham, (Harold) John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/34922. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
8. MacKenzie, p. 614.
9. Michael Cowles (2001). Statistics in Psychology: An Historical Perspective. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Incorporated. p. 105 note 1. ISBN 978-0-8058-3509-0. Retrieved 1 April 2013.
10. Theodore M. Poeter (1986). The Rise of Statistical Thinking: 1820-1900. Princeton University Press. pp. 299–300. ISBN 978-0-691-02409-7. Retrieved 1 April 2013.