John Tukey

John Wilder Tukey was born on 16 June 1915 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and died on 26 July 2000 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He split his career between Princeton University, where he joined the mathematics faculty in 1939 and later founded its Statistics Department, and Bell Telephone Laboratories. With James Cooley he published the fast Fourier transform algorithm in 1965, a computational method that made practical digital signal processing possible. In his 1977 book Exploratory Data Analysis he set out an approach that emphasizes visualizing and summarizing real data to find patterns and check assumptions before applying formal statistical tests, introducing the box plot, a diagram summarizing a data set by its median, quartiles and extreme values, as one of its central tools. He is also credited with coining the words bit, as a contraction of binary digit, and software.