John Tukey
John Wilder Tukey ( born June 16, 1915 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, † July 26, 2000 in New Brunswick ( New Jersey)) was an American statistician.
Life
Tukey was taught by his parents, both teachers, and studied at Brown University mathematics and chemistry. He made there his master's degree in chemistry and then went to Princeton University, where he in 1937 received his doctorate in mathematics at Solomon Lefschetz ( Denumerability in Topology, 1940 appeared as Convergence and Uniformity in Topology in the Annals of Mathematical Studies, Princeton University Press). After that, he was instructor at Princeton University. During World War II he worked on military research at the Fire Control Research Group, where he conducted statistical work, which led to a change of his research area after the war. He went to the statisticians SS Wilks at Princeton University, which he had met while working in the Fire Control Research Group, while also working at Bell Laboratories. In 1966 he was one of the founders of the statistics faculty at Princeton from 1966 to 1969 and its chairman.
In 1961 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1973, he received from President Richard Nixon, the National Medal of Science. In 1982, he received the Medal of Honor of the IEEE. He was a member of several U.S. delegations, for example at conferences on nuclear disarmament in Geneva and UN committees for environmental protection. He was chairman of the PSAC Panel on Chemicals and Health, which dealt with the threat posed by CFCs (ozone hole ).
In 1974 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver ( Mathematics and the picturing of data).
Work
The term bit was proposed by Tukey probably in 1946, according to other sources in 1943. In addition, Tukey in 1958 coined the term software.
The algorithm of fast Fourier transformation ( FFT) is James Cooley and Tukey attributed to him, published 1965. There were several precursors ( such as Carl Friedrich Gauss, Irving John Good, Cornelius Lanczos ), but only Cooley and Tukey's work left a lasting scientific reverberation.
Tukey considered the founder of exploratory data analysis ( Exploratory statistics) and is known for several methods of graphical data analysis in statistics ( Box and whisker plot or box plot, Stem and Leaf Diagram or stem leaf plot, Tukey 's Paired Comparisons and others). He was also a pioneer in the introduction of modern mathematical methods for estimating the spectrum in time-series analysis.
Along with Marshall Harvey Stone, he proved the theorem of Stone - Tukey, also known as ham - sandwich theorem known because there are the following illustrative expression in any number of dimensions, a mathematical form: It is always possible one with cheese and ham filled sandwich by any to decompose a planar cut into two parts, each with the same amount ( volume measure ), bread, cheese, ham in each half ( in n dimensions is taken in the formulation instead of three n sets of finite measure, the subdivision is via a (n-1 )-dimensional hyper-plane ).
See also: Lemma of Teichmüller - Tukey, quick test of Tukey