Walter Frank Raphael Weldon | |
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Raphael Weldon
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Born |
Highgate, London |
15 March 1860
Died | 13 April 1906 Oxford, England |
(aged 46)
Nationality | British |
Fields | Zoology, biometry |
Institutions |
St John's College, Cambridge University College London Oxford University |
Alma mater | St John's College, Cambridge |
Academic advisors | Francis Maitland Balfour |
Influences | Francis Galton, Karl Pearson |
Notable awards | Fellow of the Royal Society |
Walter Frank Raphael Weldon DSc FRS (Highgate, London, 15 March 1860 – Oxford, 13 April 1906) generally called Raphael Weldon, was an English evolutionary biologist and a founder of biometry. He was the joint founding editor of Biometrika, with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.
Weldon was the second child of the journalist and industrial chemist, Walter Weldon, and his wife Anne Cotton. On 13 March 1883 Weldon married Florence Tebb, daughter of the social reformer William Tebb
Medicine was his intended career and he spent the academic year 1876/1877 at University College London. Among his teachers were the zoologist E. Ray Lankester and the mathematician Olaus Henrici. In the following year he transferred to King's College London and then to St John's College, Cambridge in 1878.
There Weldon studied with the developmental morphologist Francis Balfour who influenced him greatly; Weldon gave up his plans for a career in medicine. In 1881 he gained a first-class honours degree in the Natural Science Tripos; in the autumn he left for the Naples Zoological Station to begin the first of his studies on marine biological organisms.
On his religious views, he considered himself an agnostic. He died in 1906 of acute pneumonia, and is buried at Holywell Church, Oxford.
Upon returning to Cambridge in 1882, he was appointed university lecturer in Invertebrate Morphology. Weldon's work was centred on the development of a fuller understanding of marine biological phenomena and selective death rates of these organisms.