Judith M. Tanur is an American statistician and sociologist who is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita of Sociology at Stony Brook University.
[2] When Tanur was young, her family moved from New Jersey, where she was born, to Great Neck, New York.
[3] She graduated from Great Neck High School in 1953 and entered Antioch College, studying psychology and statistics there, but in 1955 she transferred to Columbia University, in part because it was closer to the University of Pennsylvania where her future husband was studying dentistry.
Tanur completed a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1957 and began graduate studies at Penn but became pregnant and dropped out.
Eventually, she returned to graduate school, completed a master's degree in mathematical statistics from Columbia University in 1963, and took a new job as an editor for William Kruskal at the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences.