John Wilder Tukey (/ˈtuːki/[2]; June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and box plot.

[5][6][7] During World War II, Tukey worked at the Fire Control Research Office and collaborated with Samuel Wilks and William Cochran.

From 1960 to 1980, Tukey helped design the NBC television network polls used to predict and analyze elections.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Tukey played a key role in the design and conduct of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

[4] He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1982 "For his contributions to the spectral analysis of random processes and the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm".

Early in his career Tukey worked on developing statistical methods for computers at Bell Labs, where he invented the term bit in 1947.

[13] Making sense of data has a long history and has been addressed by statisticians, mathematicians, scientists, and others for many many years.

During the 1960s, Tukey challenged the dominance at the time of what he called "confirmatory data analysis", statistical analyses driven by rigid mathematical configurations.

A. D. Gordon offered the following summary of Tukey's principles for statistical practice:[16] ... the usefulness and limitation of mathematical statistics; the importance of having methods of statistical analysis that are robust to violations of the assumptions underlying their use; the need to amass experience of the behaviour of specific methods of analysis in order to provide guidance on their use; the importance of allowing the possibility of data's influencing the choice of method by which they are analysed; the need for statisticians to reject the role of "guardian of proven truth", and to resist attempts to provide once-for-all solutions and tidy over-unifications of the subject; the iterative nature of data analysis; implications of the increasing power, availability, and cheapness of computing facilities; the training of statisticians.Tukey's lectures were described to be unusual.

McCullagh described his lecture given in London in 1977:[16][17] Tukey ambled to the podium, a great bear of a man dressed in baggy pants and a black knitted shirt.

But the great bear appeared to be doing the same thing, and the feeling was not comfortable.While working with John von Neumann on early computer designs, Tukey introduced the word bit as a portmanteau of binary digit.