IP: Obit John Tukey, 85, Statistician Who Coined 2 Crucial Words (Software & Bit)

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> John W Tukey is the 'Tukey' in the 'Tukey-Cooley' FFT
>
> Interesting Obit follows:
>
>
>
> July 28, 2000
>
> John Tukey, 85, Statistician Who Coined 2 Crucial Words (Software & Bit)
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company