Florence Joy Weldon (''née'' Tebb, 1858 – 1936) was an English mathematician who worked as "one of the first college-educated human computers," analysing data about biological variation.

Early life

Florence was the daughter of businessman and activist

William Tebb William Tebb (22 October 1830 – 23 January 1917) was an English businessman and wide-ranging social reformer. He was an anti-vaccinationist and author of anti-vaccination books.''Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853� ...

. Her younger sister was physiologist Mary Tebb. In the early 1880s she studied mathematics at

Girton College, Cambridge Girton College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was established in 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon as the first women's college at Cambridge. In 1948, it was granted full college status by the un ...

. She married evolutionary biologist

Raphael Weldon Walter Frank Raphael Weldon FRS (15 March 1860 – 13 April 1906), was an English evolutionary biologist and a founder of biometry. He was the joint founding editor of ''Biometrika'', with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Family Weldon was th ...

in March 1883.

Computation

Florence joined with Weldon’s work on biological variation in shrimps and crabs. The pair travelled around England, Italy and the Bahamas, collecting about a thousand specimens at a time. Florence worked as Weldon’s chief computer in analysing the data collected by measuring the specimens. With no calculating machines available, she used logarithms and Crelle tables. One study involved taking twenty-three measurements each from a thousand shore crab specimens from the Bay of Naples, which demonstrated that twenty-two of the features measured were

normally distributed In probability theory and statistics, a normal distribution or Gaussian distribution is a type of continuous probability distribution for a real number, real-valued random variable. The general form of its probability density function is f(x ...

and the other was

bimodal In statistics, a multimodal distribution is a probability distribution with more than one mode (i.e., more than one local peak of the distribution). These appear as distinct peaks (local maxima) in the probability density function, as shown ...

. Another study included taking measurements in duplicate from over eight thousand crabs. Florence’s contribution was acknowledged by her long-time friend and correspondent

Karl Pearson Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English biostatistician and mathematician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university ...

, who completed her husband's manuscripts after his death.

Art collection and legacy

In 1928, Florence received an honorary degree of Master of Arts from the University of Oxford after making a significant bequest of French paintings there. The

Ashmolean Museum The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street in Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University ...

also contains a room named in her honour. Florence died in 1936, leaving the residue of her estate to establish a Chair of Biometry at the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

References

{{reflist 1858 births 1936 deaths Alumni of Girton College, Cambridge 19th-century British women mathematicians