John Tukey

John Tukey was an American mathematician and statistician who lived from 1915 to 2000. He is best known for developing the fast Fourier transform algorithm and the box plot, and for laying the foundations of exploratory data analysis. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he studied chemistry at Brown University before moving to Princeton University, where he received a PhD in mathematics in 1939 with a dissertation on denumerability in topology. During the Second World War he worked at the Fire Control Research Office, and afterwards he divided his time between Princeton and AT&T Bell Laboratories, becoming the founding chairman of the Princeton statistics department in 1965. Several statistical tools carry his name, among them the Tukey range test and the Tukey lambda distribution, and he is credited with coining the term bit.