Tukey, John (1915–2000)

John W. Tukey was a mathematician and statistician responsible for many innovations in data analysis. He was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and educated at home until he entered Brown University in 1933. After earning degrees in chemistry at Brown, Tukey entered Princeton University in 1937 to continue his study of chemistry. He began attending lectures in the Department of Mathematics, and, in 1939, received a Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton. He remained there for the rest of his career as Professor of Mathematics, and later, he served as the founding chairman of the Department of Statistics. For most of his career, Tukey also held positions at AT&T's Bell Laboratories, where he worked on projects such as [Page 1048]the Nike missile system, the methods for ...