Person: Tukey, John Wilder
John Tukey introduced the Fast Fourier Transform and worked in other areas of Statistics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- John also had the benefit of an excellent public library in New Bedford which even possessed journals such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.
- After Brown University awarded him a Bachelor's Degree in chemistry in 1936 and a Master's Degree in chemistry in the following year, Tukey went to Princeton University in 1937 intending to study for his doctorate in chemistry.
- Tukey's research was supervised by Lefschetz and he received his doctorate in 1939 for a dissertation Denumerability in topology which was published in 1940 as Convergence and uniformity in topology .
- External events were to play a major role in the direction of Tukey's career mainly as a result of him joining the Fire Control Research office to contribute towards the war effort.
- There were other statisticians in Princeton, also contributing towards the war effort, in particular Wilks and Cochran, and Tukey soon began exchanging ideas with these men.
- However one post was not enough to absorb his energy and, also in 1945, Tukey joined the AT&T Bell Laboratories where his colleagues included Shewhart, Hamming and Shannon.
- Only a workaholic like Tukey could have played such a major role in all three of these activities.
- As an academic couple, John and Elizabeth Tukey achieved the highest standards for wisdom and kindness.
- Tukey's first major contribution to statistics was his introduction of modern techniques for the estimation of spectra of time series.
- Tukey spent his whole career at Princeton.
- At the AT&T Bell Laboratories, Tukey was involved in the development of electronic computers.
- Tukey also made substantial contributions to the analysis of variance and the problem of making simultaneous inferences about a set of parameter values from a single experiment.
- Tukey's lecturing style was unusual.
- When it was complete, Tukey turned to face the audience and the podium ...
- Tukey liked to play games his way to get people to figure out for themselves the things that he already knew.
- Tukey was awarded many honours for his outstanding contributions.
Born 16 June 1915, New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA. Died 26 July 2000, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Usa, Statistics
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
