John Wilder Tukey, an emeritus Princeton professor considered to be one of
the most important contributors to modem statistics, died July 25. He was
85. Prof. Tukey developed many important tools of modern statistics and
introduced concepts were central to the creation of today's
telecommunications' technologies. In addition to his formidable research
achievements, he was known for his penchant for coining terms that
reflected new ideas techniques in the sciences and is credited with
introducing the computer science terms "bit" and "software."
Prof. Tukey, Princeton's Donner Professor of Science Emeritus, actively
applied his Mathematical insights to real world problems in engineering
and, social sciences, serving as staff researcher and associate executive
director for research at ATT&T Bell Laboratories (now Lucent Technologies
and Bell Labs Innovations).
For decades; he was an active consultant to such companies as Educational
Testing Service and Merck & Co, and contributed such areas as military
operations in WW2, US census-taking strategies and projecting the
election-day results of presidential contests for national television.
"He probably made more original contributions to statistics than anyone
else since WW2 said Frederick Mosteller, retired professor of mathematical
statistics at Harvard. I believe that, the whole country-- scientifically,
industrially, financially, is better off because of him and bears evidence
of his influence," said retired Princeton Professor John A Wheeler, who is
a major figure in the history of physics and the development of the atomic
bomb.
Among Prof. Tukey's most farreaching contributions was his development of
techniquesfor "robust analysis," an approach to statistics that guards
against wrong answers, in situations where a randomly chosen sample of data
happens to poorly represent the rest of the data set. He also pioneered
approaches to exploratory data analysis, developing graphing and plotting
methods that are fixtures of introductory statistics texts and authored
many publications on time series analysis and other aspects of digital
signal processing that have become central to modern engineering and science.
In addition to his research achievements, Prof. Tukey was known for his
passions for folk dancing and collecting murder mystery and science fiction
books. "John was a very lively presence on campus,' said
Princeton Professor of Mathematics Robert Gunning, Former chair of the
mathematics department and dean of the faculty. In one commonly told
anecdote, Prof. Tukey put his extraordinary calculating abilities to work
as chairman of the Faculty Committee on Schedule, working out the seemingly
intractable complexities of arranging times for classes and exams. "'He
would lie, flat on. his back on a table and people would list the
scheduling difficulties and he would reel off solutions," Prof. Gunning
said. "He did it quickly and quietly his head."
Prof. Tukey also was instrumental in creating a citation index for
statistical literature and was known for carrying publication lists with
him and working out the complexities of crossreferences in his spare time.
John Tukey was born in Bedford Mass on June 16, 1915. He earned bachelor's
and master's degrees in chemistry from Brown University in 1936 and 1937
before coming to Princeton for graduate work in mathematics. He earned
his Ph.D in just two years. After spending wartime years in the
government's Fire Control Research Office in Princeton, Dr. Tukey rose to
the rank of full professor by 1950 at age 35.
Building on a foundation laid by statistician, Samuel S. Wilks, Prof. Tukey
helped found a department of statistics, which split from the mathematics,
department in 1966, and chaired the department until 1970. The
department later became today's Committee for Statistical
Studies. Among many awards and honors, Prof. Tukey received the National
Medal of Science In 1973 and an honorary doctorate from Princeton In 1998,
and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society
of England.
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