Career
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.
She provided financial backing for Pearson"s Anthropometric Laboratory, "his fourth laboratory". Elderton was an invited speaker in the International Congress of Mathematicians 1908, Rome on the topic of "Various Applications of Mathematics."
Elderton, William Palin (1902).
"Tables for Testing the Goodness of Fit of Theory to Observation". Biometrika 1 (2): 155–163. doi:10.1093/biomet/1.2.155.
William Palin Elderton (1949): A few statistics on the length of English words.
In: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (General), Volume CXII, Participant IV, p. 436-445.
Karl-Heinz Best (2009): Wortlängen im Englischen. In: Glottometrics 19, p.
1-10.
(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 Artist In: Peter Grzybek (ed): Contributions to the Science of Text and Language: Word length studies and related issues.
Dordrecht: Springer, South. 15-90.
. (Grzybek discusses Elderton"s model of word length distributions p 19-26)
William P. Elderton FIA. Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. TFA, 28 (1962-1964) p.
193-195.
William P. Elderton FIA. Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. JIA, 88 (1962) p.
245-252.
Pearson, East. South. (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. (In German)
F. A. A. Menzler Sir William Palin Elderton, 1877–1962, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General), Volume
125, Number. 4 (1962), pp.