Redfield & Wilton takes its name from two twentieth‑century mathematicians whose work captures the philosophy behind our research: finding the patterns others overlook and understanding the real movement hidden within numbers.
J. Howard Redfield was an American who earned his living as a civil engineer and pursued mathematics independently. In 1927, working outside the mathematical establishment, he published a method for finding structure among vast numbers of possibilities. It was almost entirely overlooked. Only after his death did the field recognise that he had anticipated by ten years what is now known as the Redfield–Pólya enumeration theorem.
The pattern was there all along. It simply took thirty years for anyone to see it.
John Raymond Wilton, born in 1884 on the other side of the world, took the opposite path. A Cambridge‑trained mathematician who became Professor of Mathematics at Adelaide, he was drawn in G. H. Hardy’s words to “deep and difficult problems”. Early in his career, he turned to the mathematics of waves and ripples. That work outlived him: the phenomenon he described in 1915 is still known as Wilton ripples.
An unrecognised outsider and a celebrated professor, half a world apart. They never met. They died five days apart, in April 1944.
Their names represent two sides of what we do.
Public opinion, like a wave, is constantly moving. Individual polls capture moments, but moments can mislead. A sudden shift may be nothing more than a ripple. What matters is recognising when movements become something more significant: a real trend.
That is why Redfield & Wilton is built around trend data. We measure comparable attitudes repeatedly, separating noise from genuine change and setting what people think today against where opinion is heading.
There is one more thing in Redfield and Wilton’s story that matters to us. Discovery does not belong exclusively to institutions or experts. Sometimes it takes someone looking at familiar information differently to see what everyone else has missed.
That principle shapes what we do with our data. We don’t believe its value should end with the conclusions we draw from it. Through the Redfield & Wilton data platform, we license access to our underlying trend data, allowing users to interrogate it for themselves exploring movements over time, comparing attitudes, testing assumptions and discovering patterns that even we may not have seen.
In other words, we provide the data. You can make the discovery.