Arthur Black (mathematician)

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.MacKenzie, p. 613. He became a student of William Clifford at University College London.{{Cite web |url=http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search2?coll_id=1588&inst_id=13 |title=aim25.ac.uk, Black (Arthur) Notebooks. |access-date=30 December 2006 |archive-date=11 May 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080511045930/http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search2?coll_id=1588&inst_id=13 |url-status=dead }} He was in a business partnership with the lawyer Robert Singleton Garnett, elder brother to Edward Garnett.{{cite book|author=Roger W. Peattie|title=Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_JVbv4v1eNEC&pg=PA655|accessdate=1 April 2013|date=1 November 2010|publisher=Penn State Press|isbn=978-0-271-04424-8|page=655 note 1}}{{cite book|author=Joseph Conrad|title=The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MqRyrCUlux4C&pg=PR37|accessdate=1 April 2013|date=20 December 2007|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-88189-0|page=xxxvii}} In 1893 he killed his wife, son and himself.{{cite book|author=David Trotter|title=Paranoid modernism|url=https://archive.org/details/paranoidmodernis0000trot|url-access=registration|accessdate=1 April 2013|year=2001|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-818755-4|page=[https://archive.org/details/paranoidmodernis0000trot/page/5 5]}} His daughter Gertrude Speedwell Black (1887–1963) survived, and married H. J. Massingham.{{cite book|author=D. H. Lawrence|title=The Letters of D. H. Lawrence|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=joIBresBrkIC&pg=PA121|accessdate=1 April 2013|date=28 November 2002|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-00700-9|page=121}}{{cite ODNB|id=34922|title=Massingham, (Harold) John|first=Malcolm|last=Chase}}

Black's work remained unpublished at the time of his suicide.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.MacKenzie, p. 614. Notebooks survive, including attempts to formulate a quantitative theory of evolution; they also contain a derivation of the chi-squared distribution.{{cite book|author=Michael Cowles|title=Statistics in Psychology: An Historical Perspective|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GkkIs3fhNqwC&pg=PA105|accessdate=1 April 2013|year=2001|publisher=Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Incorporated|isbn=978-0-8058-3509-0|page=105 note 1}} A long manuscript, Algebra of Animal Evolution, was sent to Karl Pearson, who then transmitted it to Francis Galton; it is now lost. Pearson and Walter Frank Raphael Weldon thought highly of the work, but Galton had reservations.{{cite book|author=Theodore M. Poeter|title=The Rise of Statistical Thinking: 1820-1900|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5a2a3jlBNb0C&pg=PA299|accessdate=1 April 2013|year=1986|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0-691-02409-7|pages=299–300}}

• 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

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Category:19th-century English mathematicians

Category:English statisticians

Category:1851 births

Category:1893 deaths

Category:Alumni of University College London

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