ABSTRACT
The life and work of Sir Francis Galton is surely the most important in any history of the fi eld of gifted education. He not only was the fi rst to study giftedness in a serious way but also invented statistical techniques such as correlation and regression in order to use statistics to handle the data sets he constructed. His interest in children in schools and women in hospitals led to his initiating questionnaires to collect data on needs in both settings. Galton’s investigations led to improved attention to vision and hearing needs of children and to pregnancy issues related for women. Thus, his work impacted many aspects of what we still do today in education in general as well as in gifted education.
