> >John Tukey, 85, Statistician Who Coined 2 Crucial Words >By DAVID LEONHARDT >NYT, 0.7.28 > John Wilder Tukey, one of the most influential statisticians of the >last 50 years and a wide-ranging thinker credited with inventing the word >"software," died on Wednesday in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 85. > The cause was a heart attack after a short illness, said Phyllis >Anscombe, his sister-in-law. > Mr. Tukey developed important theories about how to analyze data and >compute series of numbers quickly. He spent decades as both a professor at >Princeton University and a researcher at AT&T's Bell Laboratories, and his >ideas continue to be a part of both doctoral statistics courses and high >school math classes. In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon awarded him the >National Medal of Science. > But Mr. Tukey frequently ventured outside of the academy as well, >working as a consultant to the government and corporations and taking part >in social debates. > In the 1950's, he criticized Alfred C. Kinsey's research on sexual >behavior. In the 1970's, he was chairman of a research committee that warned >that aerosol spray cans damaged the ozone layer. More recently, he >recommended that the 1990 Census be adjusted by using statistical formulas >in order to count poor urban residents whom he believed it had missed. > "The best thing about being a statistician," Mr. Tukey once told a >colleague, "is that you get to play in everyone's backyard." > An intense man who liked to argue and was fond of helping other >researchers, Mr. Tukey was also an amateur linguist who made significant >contributions to the language of modern times. In a 1958 article in American >Mathematical Monthly, he became the first person to define the programs on >which electronic calculators ran, said Fred R. Shapiro, a librarian at Yale >Law School who is editing a book on the origin of terms. Three decades >before the founding of Microsoft, Mr. Tukey saw that "software," as he >called it, was gaining prominence. "Today," he wrote at the time, it is "at >least as important" as the " 'hardware' of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes >and the like." > Twelve years earlier, while working at Bell Laboratories, he had >coined the term "bit," an abbreviation of "binary digit" that described the >1's and 0's that are the basis of computer programs. > Both words caught on, to the chagrin of some computer scientists who >saw Mr. Tukey as an outsider. "Not everyone was happy that he was naming >things in their field," said Steven M. Schultz, a spokesman for Princeton. > Mr. Tukey had no immediate survivors. His wife of 48 years, >Elizabeth Rapp Tukey, an antiques appraiser and preservation activist, died >in 1998. > Mr. Tukey was born in 1915 in New Bedford, a fishing town on the >southern coast of Massachusetts, and was the only child of Ralph H. Tukey >and Adah Tasker Tukey. His mother was the valedictorian of the class of 1898 >at Bates College in Lewiston, Me., and her closest competition was her >eventual husband, who became the salutatorian. Classmates referred to them >as the couple most likely to give birth to a genius, said Marc G. Glass, a >Bates spokesman. > The elder Mr. Tukey became a Latin teacher at New Bedford's high >school, but, because of a rule barring spouses from teaching at the school, >Mrs. Tukey was a private tutor, Mrs. Anscombe said. Mrs. Tukey's main pupil >became her son, who attended regular classes only for special subjects like >French. "They were afraid that if he went to school, he'd get lazy," said >Howard Wainer, a friend and former student of John Tukey's. > In 1936, Mr. Tukey graduated from nearby Brown University with a >bachelor's degree in chemistry, and in the next three years earned three >graduate degrees, one in chemistry at Brown and two in mathematics at >Princeton, where he would spend the rest of his career. At the age of 35, he >became a full professor, and in 1965 he became the founding chairman of >Princeton's statistics department. > Mr. Tukey worked for the United States government during World War >II. Friends said he did not discuss the details of his projects, but Mrs. >Anscombe said he helped design the U-2 spy plane. > In later years, much of his important work came in a field that >statisticians call robust analysis, which allows researchers to devise >credible conclusions even when the data with which they are working are >flawed. In 1970, Mr. Tukey published "Exploratory Data Analysis," which gave >mathematicians new ways to analyze and present data clearly. > One of those tools, the stem-and-leaf display, continues to be part >of many high school curriculums. Using it, students arrange a series of data >points in a series of simple rows and columns and can then make judgments >about what techniques, like calculating the average or median, would allow >them to analyze the information intelligently. > That display was typical of Mr. Tukey's belief that mathematicians, >professional or amateur, should often start with their data and then look >for a theorem, rather than vice versa, said Mr. Wainer, who is now the >principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service. > "He legitimized that, because he wasn't doing it because he wasn't >good at math," Mr. Wainer said. "He was doing it because it was the right >thing to do." > Along with another scientist, James Cooley, Mr. Tukey also developed >the Fast Fourier Transform, an algorithm with wide application to the >physical sciences. It helps astronomers, for example, determine the spectrum >of light coming from a star more quickly than previously possible. > As his career progressed, he also became a hub for other scientists. >He was part of a group of Princeton professors that gathered regularly and >included Lyman Spitzer Jr., who inspired the Hubble Space Telescope. Mr. >Tukey also persuaded a group of the nation's top statisticians to spend a >year at Princeton in the early 1970's working together on robust analysis >problems, said David C. Hoaglin, a former student of Mr. Tukey. > Mr. Tukey was a consultant to the Educational Testing Service, the >Xerox Corporation and Merck & Company. From 1960 to 1980, he helped design >the polls that the NBC television network used to predict and analyze >elections. > His first brush with publicity came in 1950, when the National >Research Council appointed him to a committee to evaluate the Kinsey Report, >which shocked many Americans by describing the country's sexual habits as >far more diverse than had been thought. From their first meeting, when Mr. >Kinsey told Mr. Tukey to stop singing a Gilbert and Sullivan tune aloud >while working, the two men clashed, according to "Alfred C. Kinsey," a >biography by James H. Jones. > In a series of meetings over two years, Mr. Kinsey vigorously >defended his work, which Mr. Tukey believed was seriously flawed, relying on >a sample of people who knew each other. 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