Roger Newland Shepard is a cognitive scientist and author of the Universal Law of Generalization He is considered a father of research on spatial relations. He studied mental rotation, and was an inventor of multidimensional scaling, a method for representing certain kinds of statistical data in the plane or in space with minimal distortion, so that it can be apprehended by humans. Roger Shepard was born in January 30 1929 in Palo Alto, California. He graduated from University of Stanford in 1951, then obtained his Ph.D. in psychology at Yale University in 1955. In 1995, Shepard received National Medal of Science for his contributions in the field of cognitive science. In 1966 Shepard was named professor of psychology in Harvard. He published more than 30 scientific and technical articles on human perception and the memory and on data-processing methods for the discovery of similarities in great sets of data.