Marion Webster Richardson

Marion Webster Richardson (1896–1965) was an American educational psychologist and psychometrician. He was a founder of the Psychometric Society and a founder and editor of Psychometrika. He was a co-developer of the Kuder–Richardson Formula 20.[1]

One of his most remarkable contributions was the introduction of the technique of multidimensional scaling. His contribution is twofold: he applied the method for the first time—he applied scaling to similarities of colors obtaining a two dimensional representation—[2] and, additionally, he motivated the first algorithm to the problem, the seminal paper of Young and Householder.[3] Sadly, his original paper was a conference proceeding from which only the abstract remains.[4]

  1. ^ Lorr, Maurice; Heiser, Ruth Bishop (1965). "Marion Webster Richardson (1896–1965)". Psychometrika. 30 (3): 235–237. doi:10.1007/bf02289489. PMID 5322827. S2CID 8477006.
  2. ^ Torgerson, W.S. (1952). "Multidimensional scaling: I. Theory and method". Psychometrika. 17 (4): 401–419. doi:10.1007/BF02288916. S2CID 120849755.
  3. ^ Young, G; Householder, A.S. (1938). "Discussion of a set of points in terms of their mutual distances". Psychometrika. 3: 19–22. doi:10.1007/BF02287916. S2CID 122400126.
  4. ^ Richardson, MW (1938). "Multimensional psychophysics". Psychological Bulletin. 35: 659–660.