Chicago (1957), and an Illinois State license to practice clinical psychology (1959, 1964). Wright and Bettelheim co-authored two papers. In the mid-1950s, Wright's neighbor in Chicago was the statistician Leonard Jimmie Savage. They became close friends. Daily discussions with Savage inspired Wright's interest in statistics, and in January 1957, Wright began teaching statistics and psychology at the University of Chicago Departments of Education and Psychology. Almost immediately Wright ran into trouble with his departmental colleagues for criticizing the scientific basis of education statistics texts. He would likely have lost his position had not Savage intervened on his behalf. In 1959, the University of Chicago received a gift of a UNIVAC I (1 kilobyte) vacuum tube computer, and, in 1962, the university received a $2.5 million IBM 7090 main frame computer. The latter took up the entire basement of the Institute for Computer Research at 5640 S. Ellis, Chicago. A computer was a tool then unfamiliar to social scientists. Wright, however, especially in his work with Mulliken and Roothaan, had experience writing computer programs to glean information from empirical data. He seized the opportunity to write a program to perform factor analysis and regression on the new computer. Wright may then have written and employed the first computer program for factor analysis in the social sciences. In 1960, Savage invited Georg Rasch to give a series of 24 lectures on his "models for measurement" at the University of Chicago. The Rasch model for constructing measures of ability and difficulty on the same scale subsequently became the focus of Wright's career. Contributions to measurement (1960–2001) Wright was dissatisfied with the results of the factor analysis work he'd been doing in the late 1950s on semantic differential data from Chicago area firms' marketing projects. He found the instability of the factors across data sets disconcerting, especially since the lack of a stochastic frame of reference meant there were no standard errors for the factor loadings. Listening to Rasch's lectures in 1960, Wright saw there was another way leading to results that were "stable in terms that a physicist would accept." Extending Rasch's own analogies from James Clerk Maxwell's analysis of mass, force, and acceleration, Wright subsequently used an everyday yardstick in his teaching to convey measurement concepts simply and clearly. Over the course of the years 1958–2001, Wright chaired 69 dissertations and served on 52 other dissertation committees. The vast majority of these