William Fleetwood Sheppard
Encyclopedia
William Fleetwood Sheppard (20 November 1863 – 12 October 1936) Australian-British
civil servant, mathematician
and statistician
remembered for his work in finite differences, interpolation
and statistical theory, known in particular for the eponymous Sheppard’s corrections.
William Fleetwood Sheppard was born near Sydney
, Australia
. He was the second child of Edmund Sheppard, an Englishman who had gone to Australia in 1859, and his wife Mary Grace Murray; the couple had married in 1860. Edmund Sheppard was a lawyer and became a judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland
. When he was about ten William was sent to Brisbane Grammar School
. However he stayed for only one term for the headmaster believed that the school could not do justice to such a brilliant pupil and that he had better go to school in England
.
In England Sheppard went to Charterhouse School
where he had a very successful academic career and was finally head of the school. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge
as a Foundation Scholar. When he graduated in 1884 it was as the Senior Wrangler (the mathematics student with the highest mark). This was a great prize and the Senior Wrangler was somebody. Shortly after the results came out, a letter found him, addressed only to "The Senior Wrangler, Cambridge." The third wrangler was William Bragg
and the fourth was W. H. Young
. All the top wranglers that year were coached by E. J. Routh
.
After some years preparing to become a barrister
and doing legal work, Sheppard joined the Education Department as a Junior Examiner in 1896. By 1914 he had been made an Assistant Secretary at the Board of Education. Sheppard had an extraordinary capacity for work; he would get up at 5 or 6 in the morning and work until 10 or 11 in the evening. He retired in 1921 at the age of 58. To save money, the government had asked all civil servants who would be retiring in the next few years to retire immediately; this was part of the Geddes Axe
. Sheppard could not afford to retire and so he took on work as an examiner for the Cambridge School Certificate and the University of London
. This was a great burden because he was amazingly thorough, recording all the errors that were made and the marks given to ensure consistency of marking across thousands of scripts.
Sheppard had a parallel and equally distinguished career as a mathematician, distinguished enough for him to receive the degree of Sc. D. from Cambridge in 1908 and to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1932. Sheppard was not unique in combining a civil service career with mathematical research; an almost exact contemporary was Thomas Heath, the historian of Greek mathematics, who went higher in the Civil Service and became much better known as an author. Another contemporary was the civil servant and statistician R H Hooker
. Sheppard published his first paper in 1888 and then he published nothing during his legal years. Then he resumed publishing in 1897 and kept going until 1931.
Sheppard was encouraged to turn his mathematical skills to statistics by Francis Galton
, whom he had met during his Cambridge days when he visited Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory. In his memorial piece Aitken
placed Sheppard with Edgeworth
, Pearson
and Yule
as a contributor to the development of statistics at the turn of the 20th. century. The assessment was based on the series of papers on correlation and the calculation of moments that Sheppard produced between 1897 and 1907. The first Sheppard's correction paper was in 1897. After 1907 the focus of Sheppard's work moved from statistics to interpolation and graduation and he published in mathematical and actuarial journals. The characteristics of Sheppard's work that Aitken emphasised were "thoroughness and independence." "Agility, shafts of brilliance, these are not to be found; but there is not a trace of the superficiality which sometimes goes with these qualities."
When Sheppard died he was remembered in the Mathematical Gazette with a one page note; Sheppard had been president of the Mathematical Association in 1928. The Annals of Eugenics published a long family memoir by Sheppard's son and an account of Sheppard's scientific work by Aitken. (These pieces form the basis of the present article.) The editor of the journal, Ronald Fisher
, also contributed a piece. Fisher knew Sheppard through his work on mathematical tables. Of Sheppard's work, Fisher wrote, ”We find practically nothing that ought to be retracted, and very little that is now obsolete.” However, it is clear from Fisher's article and from the notes he added to Aitken's that Sheppard's main 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.
A bibliography appears with the obituaries in the Annals of Eugenics. It contains 40 publications, the first in 1888 and the last in 1931.
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
Some correspondence between Sheppard and Fisher and between Sheppard's son and Fisher is available on the web from the University of Adelaide
Also available are the letters that passed between Fisher and Aitken in May/June 1937.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
civil servant, mathematician
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
and statistician
Statistician
A statistician is someone who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. The core of that work is to measure, interpret, and describe the world and human activity patterns within it...
remembered for his work in finite differences, interpolation
Interpolation
In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a method of constructing new data points within the range of a discrete set of known data points....
and statistical theory, known in particular for the eponymous Sheppard’s corrections.
William Fleetwood Sheppard was born near Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
. He was the second child of Edmund Sheppard, an Englishman who had gone to Australia in 1859, and his wife Mary Grace Murray; the couple had married in 1860. Edmund Sheppard was a lawyer and became a judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland
Supreme Court of Queensland
The Supreme Court of Queensland, which is based at the Law Courts Complex, is the superior court for the Australian State of Queensland and sits around the middle of the Australian court hierarchy...
. When he was about ten William was sent to Brisbane Grammar School
Brisbane Grammar School
Brisbane Grammar School is an independent, non-denominational, day and boarding school for boys, located in Spring Hill, an inner suburb of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia...
. However he stayed for only one term for the headmaster believed that the school could not do justice to such a brilliant pupil and that he had better go to school in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
.
In England Sheppard went to Charterhouse School
Charterhouse School
Charterhouse School, originally The Hospital of King James and Thomas Sutton in Charterhouse, or more simply Charterhouse or House, is an English collegiate independent boarding school situated at Godalming in Surrey.Founded by Thomas Sutton in London in 1611 on the site of the old Carthusian...
where he had a very successful academic career and was finally head of the school. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
as a Foundation Scholar. When he graduated in 1884 it was as the Senior Wrangler (the mathematics student with the highest mark). This was a great prize and the Senior Wrangler was somebody. Shortly after the results came out, a letter found him, addressed only to "The Senior Wrangler, Cambridge." The third wrangler was William Bragg
William Henry Bragg
Sir William Henry Bragg OM, KBE, PRS was a British physicist, chemist, mathematician and active sportsman who uniquely shared a Nobel Prize with his son William Lawrence Bragg - the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics...
and the fourth was W. H. Young
William Henry Young
William Henry Young was an English mathematician. Young was educated at City of London School and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He worked on measure theory, Fourier series, differential calculus amongst other fields, and made brilliant and long-lasting contributions to the study of functions of several...
. All the top wranglers that year were coached by E. J. Routh
Edward Routh
Edward John Routh FRS , was an English mathematician, noted as the outstanding coach of students preparing for the Mathematical Tripos examination of the University of Cambridge in its heyday in the middle of the nineteenth century...
.
After some years preparing to become a barrister
Barrister
A barrister is a member of one of the two classes of lawyer found in many common law jurisdictions with split legal professions. Barristers specialise in courtroom advocacy, drafting legal pleadings and giving expert legal opinions...
and doing legal work, Sheppard joined the Education Department as a Junior Examiner in 1896. By 1914 he had been made an Assistant Secretary at the Board of Education. Sheppard had an extraordinary capacity for work; he would get up at 5 or 6 in the morning and work until 10 or 11 in the evening. He retired in 1921 at the age of 58. To save money, the government had asked all civil servants who would be retiring in the next few years to retire immediately; this was part of the Geddes Axe
Geddes Axe
The Geddes Axe was the drive for public economy and retrenchment in UK government expenditure recommended in the 1920s by a Committee on National Expenditure chaired by Sir Eric Geddes and with Lord Inchcape, Lord Faringdon, Lord Maclay and Sir Guy Granet also members.-Background:During and after...
. Sheppard could not afford to retire and so he took on work as an examiner for the Cambridge School Certificate and the University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
. This was a great burden because he was amazingly thorough, recording all the errors that were made and the marks given to ensure consistency of marking across thousands of scripts.
Sheppard had a parallel and equally distinguished career as a mathematician, distinguished enough for him to receive the degree of Sc. D. from Cambridge in 1908 and to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1932. Sheppard was not unique in combining a civil service career with mathematical research; an almost exact contemporary was Thomas Heath, the historian of Greek mathematics, who went higher in the Civil Service and became much better known as an author. Another contemporary was the civil servant and statistician R H Hooker
Reginald Hawthorn Hooker
Reginald Hawthorn Hooker English civil servant, statistician and meteorologist. Hooker was a pioneer in the application of correlation analysis to economics and agricultural meteorology.- Biography :...
. Sheppard published his first paper in 1888 and then he published nothing during his legal years. Then he resumed publishing in 1897 and kept going until 1931.
Sheppard was encouraged to turn his mathematical skills to statistics by Francis Galton
Francis Galton
Sir Francis Galton /ˈfrɑːnsɪs ˈgɔːltn̩/ FRS , cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician...
, whom he had met during his Cambridge days when he visited Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory. In his memorial piece Aitken
Alexander Aitken
Alexander Craig Aitken was one of New Zealand's greatest mathematicians. He studied for a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where his dissertation, "Smoothing of Data", was considered so impressive that he was awarded a DSc in 1926, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh...
placed Sheppard with Edgeworth
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth FBA was an Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s...
, Pearson
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson FRS was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the disciplineof mathematical statistics....
and Yule
Udny Yule
George Udny Yule FRS , usually known as Udny Yule, was a British statistician, born at Beech Hill, a house in Morham near Haddington, Scotland and died in Cambridge, England. His father, also George Udny Yule, and a nephew, were knighted. His uncle was the noted orientalist Sir Henry Yule...
as a contributor to the development of statistics at the turn of the 20th. century. The assessment was based on the series of papers on correlation and the calculation of moments that Sheppard produced between 1897 and 1907. The first Sheppard's correction paper was in 1897. After 1907 the focus of Sheppard's work moved from statistics to interpolation and graduation and he published in mathematical and actuarial journals. The characteristics of Sheppard's work that Aitken emphasised were "thoroughness and independence." "Agility, shafts of brilliance, these are not to be found; but there is not a trace of the superficiality which sometimes goes with these qualities."
When Sheppard died he was remembered in the Mathematical Gazette with a one page note; Sheppard had been president of the Mathematical Association in 1928. The Annals of Eugenics published a long family memoir by Sheppard's son and an account of Sheppard's scientific work by Aitken. (These pieces form the basis of the present article.) The editor of the journal, Ronald Fisher
Ronald Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher's exact test and Fisher's equation...
, also contributed a piece. Fisher knew Sheppard through his work on mathematical tables. Of Sheppard's work, Fisher wrote, ”We find practically nothing that ought to be retracted, and very little that is now obsolete.” However, it is clear from Fisher's article and from the notes he added to Aitken's that Sheppard's main virtue was that he was not Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson FRS was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the disciplineof mathematical statistics....
. Pearson had died some months previously and this appreciation of Sheppard's life is uncomfortably like a disappreciation of Pearson's.
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 SocietyJournal of the Royal Statistical SocietyThe Journal of the Royal Statistical Society is a series of three peer-reviewed statistics journals published by Blackwell Publishing for the London-based Royal Statistical Society.- History :...
, 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 FisherRonald FisherSir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher's exact test and Fisher's equation...
(1922).
External links
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
Some correspondence between Sheppard and Fisher and between Sheppard's son and Fisher is available on the web from the University of Adelaide
Also available are the letters that passed between Fisher and Aitken in May/June 1937.