Marion Webster Richardson (1896–1965) was an American educational psychologist and

psychometrician Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally refers to specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and ...

. He was a founder of the Psychometric Society and a founder and editor of

Psychometrika ''Psychometrika'' is the official journal of the Psychometric Society, a professional body devoted to psychometrics and quantitative psychology. The journal covers quantitative methods for measurement and evaluation of human behavior, including s ...

. He was a co-developer of the Kuder–Richardson Formula 20. One of his most remarkable contributions was the introduction of the technique of

multidimensional scaling Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a means of visualizing the level of similarity of individual cases of a dataset. MDS is used to translate "information about the pairwise 'distances' among a set of n objects or individuals" into a configurati ...

. His contribution is twofold: he applied the method for the first time—he applied scaling to similarities of colors obtaining a two dimensional representation— and, additionally, he motivated the first algorithm to the problem, the seminal paper of Young and Householder. Sadly, his original paper was a conference proceeding from which only the abstract remains.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Richardson, Marion Webster 1896 births 1965 deaths