On Fri, 28 Jul 2000, Miguel Roig wrote:
> I am not able to access the full on-line obituary which I did read this morning
> from my paper version of the NY Times, but:
>
> 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 July 26 in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 85.
>
> If you get a chance try to read it. Obviously, he was a very interesting fellow.
Miguel's right. Here it is:
July 28, 2000
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/00/07/28/news/national/obit-j-tukey.html
John Tukey, 85, Statistician Who Coined 2 Crucial Words
By DAVID LEONHARDT
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. Mr. Tukey said
a random selection of three people would have been better than a
group of 300 chosen by Mr. Kinsey.
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