Florence Joy Weldon (née Tebb, 1858 – 1936) was an English mathematician who worked as "one of the first college-educated human computers,"[1] analysing data about biological variation.
Early life
editFlorence was the daughter of businessman and activist William Tebb. Her younger sister was physiologist Mary Tebb. In the early 1880s she studied mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge.[2] She married evolutionary biologist Raphael Weldon in March 1883.[3][4]
Computation
editFlorence 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.[5] With no calculating machines available, she used logarithms and Crelle tables.[1] 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 and the other was bimodal.[6] Another study included taking measurements in duplicate from over eight thousand crabs.[7]
Florence’s contribution was acknowledged by her long-time friend and correspondent Karl Pearson, who completed her husband's manuscripts after his death.[6]
Art collection and legacy
editIn 1928, Florence received an honorary degree of Master of Arts from the University of Oxford after making a significant bequest of French paintings there.[8] The Ashmolean Museum also contains a room named in her honour.[6]
Florence died in 1936, leaving the residue of her estate to establish a Chair of Biometry at the University of London.[9]
References
edit- ^ a b Grier, David Alan (2013-11-01). When Computers Were Human. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-4936-9.
- ^ Radick, Gregory (2023-08-18). Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology. University of Chicago Press. p. 72. ISBN 978-0-226-82271-6.
- ^ Radick, Gregory (2023-08-18). Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-82271-6.
- ^ "Marriage of Miss Tebb". The Medium and Daybreak. 1883. p. 236.
- ^ Davis, Lea K. (2022-10-27). "Weldon, Bateson, and the origins of genetics: Reflections on the unraveling and rebuilding of a scientific community". PLOS Genetics. 18 (10): e1010379. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1010379. ISSN 1553-7390. PMC 9612466. PMID 36301806.
- ^ a b c "Oxford's female computing pioneers | Mathematical Institute". www.maths.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2024-09-01.
- ^ Flood, Raymond, ed. (2011-09-29). Mathematics in Victorian Britain. OUP Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-162794-1.
- ^ "University and Educational Intelligence". Nature. 121 (3042): 262. 1928-02-01. Bibcode:1928Natur.121..262.. doi:10.1038/121262a0. ISSN 1476-4687.
- ^ Pearson, Egon Sharpe. Karl Pearson. CUP Archive. p. 121.