W.F. Sheppard's correspondence with Karl Pearson and the development of his tables and moment estimates

Abstract

As a new statistician, W.F. Sheppard wrote a series of letters to the leading statistician of the day, Karl Pearson, for his advice. Written a century ago and spanning three decades, the letters provide a glimpse into the development of two significant contributions to statistics: the normal probability tables, and the corrections of moment estimates. Sheppard's normal probability tables were the first set of modern tables for the standard normal distribution and have been widely used since the twentieth century. We provide an examination of the statistical research carried out by Sheppard and Pearson in the context of their correspondence.