Louis Guttman, 1916-1987

The development of scaling theory by Louis Guttman at Cornell and by Clyde Coombs at Michigan is one of 62 "major advances in social science" identified and analyzed in Science by Deutsch, Platt, and Senghaas (1971) for the period 1900-1965. Observing that these achievements were increasingly likely to be the products of teamwork (teams account for more than half of the advances since the 1930s, and less than one quarter in the earlier period), Deutsch et al. emphasize that these team workers "were not colorless cogs in an anonymous machine." Rather, say the authors,