John Wilder Tukey, Donner Professor of Science Emeritus at Princeton
University, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on June 16,1915. After
earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry at Brown
University in 1936 and 1937, respectively, he started his career at Princeton
University with a Ph.D.in mathematics in 1939 followed by an immediate
appointment as Henry B.Fine Instructor in Mathematics. A decade later, at age
35, he was advanced to a full professorship. He directed the Statistical
Research Group at Princeton University from its founding in 1956;when the
Department of Statistics was formed in 1965, he was named its first chairman
and held that post until 1970. He was appointed to the Donner Chair in 1976 and
remained at Princeton until reaching emeritus status in 1985. At the same time,
he was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories since 1945,
advancing to Assistant Director of Research, Communications Principles, in 1958
and, in 1961, to Associate Executive Director, Research Information Sciences, a
position he held until retirement in 1985.
¶ Throughout World War II he participated in projects assigned to the
Princeton Branch of the Frankford Arsenal Fire Control Design Division. This
wartime service marked the beginning of his close and continuing association
with governmental committees and agencies. Among other activities he was a
member of the U.S. Delegation to the Conference on the Discontinuance of
Nuclear Weapons Tests in Geneva in 1959, served on the President’s
Science Advisory Committee from 1960 to 1964 and was a member of President
Johnson’s Task Force on Environmental Pollution and President
Nixon’s Task Force on Air Pollution. The long list of awards and honors
that Tukey has received includes the S.S.Wilks Medal from the American
Statistical Association (ASA)(1965), the National Medal of Science (1973), the
Medal of Honor from the IEEE (1982), the Deming Medal from the American Society
of Quality Control (1983) and the Educational Testing Service Award (1990). He
holds honorary degrees from Case Institute of Technology, the University of
Chicago and Brown, Temple, Yale and Waterloo Universities; in June 1998, he was
awarded an honorary degree from Princeton University. He has led the way to the
fields of exploratory data analysis (EDA) and robust estimation. His
contributions to the spectral analysis of time series and other aspects of
digital signal processes have been widely used in engineering and science. His
collaboration with a fellow mathematician resulted in the discovery of the fast
Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm. Author of Exploratory Data Analysis
and eight volumes of collected papers, he has contributed to a wide variety of
areas and has coauthored several books. He has guided more than 50 graduate
students to successful Ph.D.’s and inspired their careers. A detailed
list of his students as well as a complete curriculum vitae can be found in
The Practice of Data Analysis (1997), edited by D. Brillinger, L.
Fernholz, and S.Morgenthaler, Princeton University Press.
¶ John W. Tukey married Elizabeth Louise Rapp in 1950. Before their
marriage, she was Personnel Director of the Educational Testing Service in
Princeton, New Jersey.