John Tukey

Updated: 12/30/2019 by Computer Hope
John Tukey

Name: John Wilder Tukey

Born: June 16, 1915, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA

Death: July 26, 2000 (Age: 85)

Computer-related contributions

  • American statistician best known for development of the FFT algorithm and box plot.

Significant publications

  • Graphical analysis of multiresponse data (1998).
  • Fundamentals of exploratory analysis of variance (1991).
  • Understanding Robust and Exploratory Data Analysis (1983).
  • Robust estimates of location: survey and advances (1972).

Honors and 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).

Quotes

"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise."

"There is no data that can be displayed in a pie chart, that cannot be displayed BETTER in some other type of chart."