born Jan. 30, 1929, Palo Alto, Calif., U.S.
U.S. psychologist and cognitive scientist.
He received a Ph.D. from Yale University and later worked at Bell Laboratories (1958–66) and taught at Stanford University (from 1968). He is known for his work in multidimensional scaling, the use of spatial models to show similarities and dissimilarities among data. He has also examined the phenomena of "mental rotation," a form of image transformation. He received the National Medal of Science in 1995.