Richard A. Harshman was a member of the Department of Psychology of the

University of Western Ontario The University of Western Ontario (UWO; branded as Western University) is a Public university, public research university in London, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land, surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and the Thame ...

since 1976, rising in the ranks to the level of Full Professor. He died suddenly on Thursday, January 10, 2008. He was one of the pioneers of

Latent semantic analysis Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the d ...

. He made important contributions in

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

including the analysis of asymmetric square tables and the analysis of multiway tables. His work on parallel

factor analysis Factor analysis is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved variables called factors. For example, it is possible that variations in six observe ...

(

PARAFAC In multilinear algebra, the tensor rank decomposition or rank-''R'' decomposition is the decomposition of a tensor as a sum of ''R'' rank-1 tensors, where ''R'' is minimal. Computing this decomposition is an open problem. Canonical polyadic decom ...

) is used in biomedical applications,

Chemometrics Chemometrics is the science of extracting information from chemical systems by data-driven means. Chemometrics is inherently interdisciplinary, using methods frequently employed in core data-analytic disciplines such as multivariate statistics, ap ...

, and

Wireless Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information (''telecommunication'') between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided transm ...

communications. Harshman also invented three-way chess rules.

References

External links

Professor Harshman's UWO webpage
20th-century Canadian psychologists Academic staff of the University of Western Ontario 2008 deaths Year of birth missing {{Canada-academic-bio-stub