Francis Galton and the birth of regression

Francis Galton was one of the pioneers of modern statistical methods, a polymath of truly remarkable intellectual stature. He was a constantly curious and perceptive practical statistician who had much success in inventing sound theoretical structures to underpin his empirical discoveries in numerical data. This chapter gives some historical and conceptual background to his discovery of the phenomenon he called ‘regression towards mediocrity’ (today termed ‘regression to the mean’), in the course of his quantitative studies of the inheritance of physical characteristics in plants and in humans.