Sir William Palin Elderton KBE PhD (Oslo) (1877–1962) was a British
actuary who served as president of the
Institute of Actuaries (1932–1934). Elderton also had a very long association with the statistical journal
Biometrika. In its early days he published several articles, and in 1935 he became chairman of the Biometrika Trust.
In 1900 when he was training to be an actuary Elderton met
Karl Pearson and was drawn into the
University College statistical group. In 1902 Elderton computed the first tables of Pearson's
chi-squared and in 1907 he published an exposition of the
Pearson curves for actuaries. His sister
Ethel M. Elderton worked for Pearson, and together the Eldertons wrote an introduction to the new ideas in
statistics. She provided financial backing for Pearson's
Anthropometric Laboratory, "his fourth laboratory".
William Palin Elderton (1949): A few statistics on the length of English words. In: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (General), Vol. CXII, Part IV, p. 436-445.
Elderton's work
Karl-Heinz Best (2009): Wortlängen im Englischen. In: Glottometrics 19, p. 1-10. (PDF
ram-verlag.) Review of Elderton's model of word length distributions proposing alternative models.)
Peter Grzybek (2006): History and Methodology of Word Length Studies. The State of the Art. In: Peter Grzybek (ed.): Contributions to the Science of Text and Language: Word length studies and related issues. Dordrecht: Springer, S. 15-90.
ISBN978-1-4020-4067-2. (Grzybek discusses Elderton's model of word length distributions p. 19-26.)
^A comparison of some curves used for graduating chance distribution."In this paper the principal systems of curves of frequency studied by Pearson, Thiele, Charlier, Edgeworth, Bruns were exhibited. After having outlined the method of perequations of Pearson, the author applied equations of curves of form already known to practical cases relative to typical frequency." p. 28 of: Moore, C. L. E. (October 1908).
"The fourth international Congress of Mathematicians: sectional meetings". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 15: 8–43.
doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1908-01685-9.
Pearson, E. S. (1962). "William Palin Elderton, 1877–1962". Biometrika. 49 (3–4): 297–303.
doi:
10.1093/biomet/49.3-4.297.
Best, Karl-Heinz (2009): William Palin Elderton (1877-1962). In: Glottometrics 19, p. 99-101. (PDF
ram-verlag.) (In German)
F. A. A. Menzler Sir William Palin Elderton, 1877–1962, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General), Vol. 125, No. 4 (1962), pp. 669–672