Maurice Kendall developed methods for rank-based statistical comparison and helped organize statistical theory through influential textbooks. His 1938 paper introduced a measure of rank correlation associated with the Kendall rank correlation coefficient.[ref]
A New Measure of Rank Correlation by Maurice Kendall. Biometrika 30(1–2), 81–93 (1938), publisher title and byline
The coefficient compares pairs of observations: agreement between their two orderings counts positively, disagreement negatively. This makes it a measure of ordinal association rather than a measure of linear agreement in the original measurement units. For data without ties, identical orderings give coefficient one and reversed orderings minus one. Later editions of his textbook series were developed by authors including Alan Stuart, connecting probability distributions, sampling theory and inference.[ref]
Portrait of Maurice Kendall
. University of St Andrews, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive. Photographer and image licence are not asserted. Source. Articles by others on the same topic
Maurice Kendall (1907–2007) was a prominent British statistician renowned for his contributions to the field of statistics, particularly in the areas of nonparametric statistics and time series analysis. He is best known for developing several important statistical methodologies and for his work on the Kendall tau rank correlation coefficient, a measure of correlation between two variables that is based on the ranks of their values rather than their actual values.