John Tukey

Tukey was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1915, to a Latin teacher father and a private tutor. He was mainly taught by his mother and attended regular classes only for certain subjects like French. During World War II, Tukey worked at the Fire Control Research Office and collaborated with Samuel Wilks and William Cochran. After the war, he returned to Princeton, dividing his time between the university and AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1962, Tukey was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He became a full professor at 35 and founding chairman of the Princeton statistics department in 1965. Tukey retired in 1985. He died in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on July 26, 2000. == Scientific contributions ==

Early in his career Tukey worked on developing statistical methods for computers at Bell Labs, where he coined the word bit in 1947. Data analysis and foundations of data science John Tukey contributed greatly to statistical practice and data analysis in general. In fact, some regard John Tukey as the father of data science. At the very least, he pioneered many of the key foundations of what came later to be known as data science. Making sense of data has a long history and has been addressed by statisticians, mathematicians, scientists, and others for many many years. During the 1960s, Tukey challenged the dominance at the time of what he called "confirmatory data analysis", statistical analyses driven by rigid mathematical configurations. Tukey emphasized the importance of having a more flexible attitude towards data analysis and of exploring data carefully to see what structures and information might be contained therein. He called this "exploratory data analysis" (EDA). In many ways, EDA was a precursor to data science. Tukey also realized the importance of computer science to EDA. Graphics are an integral part of EDA methodology and, while much of Tukey's work focused on static displays (such as box plots) that could be drawn by hand, he realized that computer graphics would be much more effective for studying multivariate data. PRIM-9, the first program for viewing multivariate data, was conceived by him during the early 1970s. This coupling of data analysis and computer science is what is now called data science. Tukey articulated the important distinction between exploratory data analysis and confirmatory data analysis, believing that much statistical methodology placed too great an emphasis on the latter. Though he believed in the utility of separating the two types of analysis, he pointed out that sometimes, especially in natural science, this was problematic and termed such situations uncomfortable science. A. D. Gordon of the University of St. Andrews offered the following summary of Tukey's principles for statistical practice: Tukey's lectures were described to be unusual. McCullagh described his lecture given in London in 1977: ==Contributions to other fields==

Tukey made wide-ranging contributions beyond statistics, once reportedly remarking, "The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard." The term bit was first used in an article by Claude Shannon in 1948. Tukey is also credited with the first use of the word software to describe computer programs in a 1958 article in American Mathematical Monthly. ==See also==

• Tukey, John W. (1977). Exploratory Data Analysis. Pearson. ISBN 978-0-201-07616-5. • Tukey, John W. (1991) Visual Display of Quantitative Phenomena ASIN B00EB04I6C • Tukey, John W. (1982) Understanding Robust and Exploratory Data Analysis Wiley, ISBN 0471097772 • Tukey, John W. (1991) Configural Polysampling Wiley, ISBN 0471523720 • Basford, K. and Tukey J. (1998) Graphical Analysis of Multi-response Data, CRC ISBN 0412818906 == Publications ==

• • • . • • * • • • • • . • • ; The collected works of John W Tukey, edited by William S. Cleveland • • • • • • • • ;About John Tukey • • Interview of John Tukey about his experience at Princeton • Frederick Mosteller and John W. Tukey: A Conversation moderated by Francis J. Anscombe, Statistical Science Vol. 3, No. 1 (Feb. 1988), pp. 136–144. == References ==