Egon Pearson was born on August 11, 1895 in Hampstead England, the son of the famous statistician Karl Pearson. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge University, but left in 1915 to help with the war effort. He was awarded a BA degree in 1919 by examination, and joined his father's Department of Applied Statistics at University College London in 1921. In his early years, Pearson was under his father's shadow, and also suffered because of the bitter dispute between his father and Ronald Fisher. He became head of the Department of Applied Statistics at University College in 1933.
Egon Pearson made fundamental contributions to statistics, particularly in collaboration with Jerzy Neyman and William Gosset. He served as managing editor of the journal Biometrica and spent considerable time revising his father's massive set of statistical tables. During World War II he did important applied work on the statistics of shell fragmentation. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1966.
Egon Pearson died on June 12, 1989 in Midhurst, Sussex, England.