Honours and Impact
Over the course of his career Galton received many major awards, including the Copley medal of the Royal Society (1910). He received in 1853 the highest award from the Royal Geographical Society, one of two gold medals awarded that year, for his explorations and map-making of southwest Africa. He was elected a member of the prestigious Athenaeum Club in 1855 and made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1860. His autobiography also lists the following:
- Silver Medal, French Geographical Society (1854)
- Gold Medal of the Royal Society (1886)
- Officier de l'Instruction Publique, France (1891)
- D.C.L. Oxford (1894)
- Sc.D. (Honorary), Cambridge (1895)
- Huxley Medal, Anthropological Institute (1901)
- Elected Hon. Fellow Trinity College, Cambridge (1902)
- Darwin Medal, Royal Society (1902)
- Linnean Society of London's Darwin–Wallace Medal (1908)
Galton was knighted in 1909. His statistical heir Karl Pearson, first holder of the Galton Chair of Eugenics at University College London (now Galton Chair of Genetics), wrote a three-volume biography of Galton, in four parts, after his death (Pearson 1914, 1924, 1930). The eminent psychometrician Lewis Terman estimated that his childhood IQ was on the order of 200, based on the fact that he consistently performed mentally at roughly twice his chronological age (Forrest 1974). (This follows the original definition of IQ as mental age divided by chronological age, rather than the modern distribution-deviate definition.)
The flowering plant genus Galtonia was named in his honour.
Read more about this topic: Francis Galton
Famous quotes containing the words honours and/or impact:
“Come hither, all ye empty things,
Ye bubbles rais’d by breath of Kings;
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither, and behold your fate.
Let pride be taught by this rebuke,
How very mean a thing’s a Duke;
From all his ill-got honours flung,
Turn’d to that dirt from whence he sprung.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“If the federal government had been around when the Creator was putting His hand to this state, Indiana wouldn’t be here. It’d still be waiting for an environmental impact statement.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)