virtue was that he was not Karl Pearson. Pearson had died some months previously and this appreciation of Sheppard's life is uncomfortably like a disappreciation of Pearson's. Family In 1902 he married Elsa Stevens. Some publications of W. F. Sheppard W. F. Sheppard (1897) "On the Calculation of the Average Square, Cube, of a Large Number of Magnitudes", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 60, 698–703. W. F. Sheppard (1898) "On the Calculation of the Most Probable Values of Frequency Constants for data arranged according to Equidistant Divisions of a Scale", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 29, 353–80. W. F. Sheppard (1899) "On the Application of the Theory of Error to Cases of Normal Distribution and Normal Correlation", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A, 192,101–167+531. W. F. Sheppard (1907) "Table of Deviates of the Normal Curve", Biometrika, v. 404–406. W. F. Sheppard (1921) "Reduction of Error by Linear Compounding", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A, 221, 199–237. W. F. Sheppard (1923) From Determinant to Tensor, Clarendon Press Oxford. A bibliography appears with the obituaries in the Annals of Eugenics. It contains 40 publications, the first in 1888 and the last in 1931. Discussions A. C. Aitken and E T Whittaker (1935–36) William Fleetwood Sheppard, Sc.D., LL.M., Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh 56, 279–282. There is a link to this obituary in the MacTutor article referred to below. "William Fleetwood Sheppard", Mathematical Gazette, 20, December 1936. N. F. Sheppard (1937) W. F. Sheppard, F.R.S.E., Sc. D., Ll. M.: "Personal History", Annals of Eugenics, 8, 1–9. A. C. Aitken (1937) "A Note on Sheppard’s Contributions to Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics", Annals of Eugenics, 8, 9–11. R. A. Fisher (1937) "The Character of Sheppard’s Work", Annals of Eugenics, 8, 11–12. Donald A. MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain 1865–1930 : the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge, Edinburgh University Press. 1981. MacKenzie is particularly interested in the relationship between Sheppard and Galton. The standard modern histories and encyclopedias pay little attention to Sheppard. See, however, A. Hald (2001) "On the History of the Correction for Grouping, 1873–1922", Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 28, 417–428. This puts Sheppard's work into a story that begins with Thiele (1873) and ends with Fisher (1922). References External links Presidents of the Mathematical Association In 1926 Sheppard sent Karl Pearson the letters he had had from Galton and Pearson used them in his Life of Francis Galton, Vol 3b. See