| Lancelot Hogben |
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Information AboutLancelot Hogben |
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He was born in Portsmouth and brought up in Southsea , Hampshire . His parents were Plymouth Brethren ; he broke young from the family religion. He attended Tottenham County School in London, where his family had moved, and then as a medical student studied physiology at Trinity College, Cambridge . He took his degree in 1915. He had acquired Socialist convictions, changing the name of the university's Fabian Society to Socialist Society. During World War I he was a Pacifist and was imprisoned as a Conscientious Objector in 1916; this was after six months working with the Red Cross in France, and his deliberate return to Cambridge. His health collapsed after maltreatment and he was released in 1917. After a year's convalescence he took lecturing positions in London universities, moving in 1922 to the University Of Edinburgh and its Animal Breeding Research Department. He then went to McGill University , and in 1927 to a zoology chair at the University Of Cape Town . He worked on Endocrinology and used the Xenopus Frog . This had direct application to Pregnancy Testing . While the job in South Africa was attractive Hogben's antipathy to the contry's racial policies drove him to leave. In 1930 he moved to the London School Of Economics , in a chair for Social Biology . In 1932 he with Haldane, Huxley and geneticist Francis Albert Eley Crew (1886-1973) founded a Society for Experimental Biology. Accoding to Gary Werskey, Hogben was the only one of the four not holding some Eugenicist ideas. He became a Fellow Of The Royal Society in 1936. The citation read
The social biology position at the LSE was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and when it withdrew funding Hogben moved, becoming Regius Professor of Natural History at the University Of Aberdeen in 1937. Hogben produced two best-selling works of popular science, ''Mathematics for the Million'' (1936) and ''Science for the Citizen'' (1938). These were big ambitious books. While at Aberdeen Hogben developed an interest in language. Besides editing ''The Loom of Language'' by his friend Frederick Bodmer , he created an international language, Interglossa, as ‘a draft of an auxiliary for a democratic world order’. During World War II Hogben had responsibility for the British Army 's medical statistics. He was Mason Professor of Zoology at the University Of Birmingham 1941-1947 and professor of medical statistics there 1947-1961, when he retired. He then took a position at the University Of Guyana . WORKS
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For a tribute to ''Mathematics for the Million'' from Fields medallist David Mumford
Some of the correspondence between Hogben and R. A. Fisher is available online |
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