John W. Tukey

John Tukey
John Wilder Tukey
Born	(1915-06-16)June 16, 1915 New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	July 26, 2000(2000-07-26) (aged 85) New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.
Residence	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	Bell Labs Princeton University
Alma mater	Brown University Princeton University
Doctoral advisor	Solomon Lefschetz
Doctoral students	Arthur Dempster Leo Goodman Paul Meier Frederick Mosteller Kai Lai Chung
Known for	Exploratory data analysis Projection pursuit Box plot Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm Tukey's range test Tukey lambda distribution Tukey–Duckworth test Siegel–Tukey test Tukey's trimean Tukey's test of additivity Tukey's lemma Blackman-Tukey transformation Tukey mean difference plot Tukey median and Tukey depth Coining the term 'bit'
Notable awards	Samuel S. Wilks Award (1965) National Medal of Science (USA) in Mathematical, Statistical, and Computational Sciences (1973) Shewhart Medal (1976) IEEE Medal of Honor (1982) Deming Medal (1982) James Madison Medal (1984) Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1991)

John Wilder Tukey ForMemRS (/ˈtuːki/; June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American mathematician best known for development of the FFT algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, the Tukey test of additivity, and the Teichmüller–Tukey lemma all bear his name.

Tukey was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1915, and obtained a B.A. in 1936 and M.Sc. in 1937, in chemistry, from Brown University, before moving to Princeton University where he received a Ph.D. in mathematics.

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. He became a full professor at 35 and founding chairman of the Princeton statistics department in 1965.

Among many contributions to civil society, Tukey served on a committee of the American Statistical Association that produced a report challenging the conclusions of the Kinsey Report, Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.