Books by John Tukey
Great thoughts from John Tukey
…Far better an approximate answer to the right question,
than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise….
Once upon a time statisticians only explored.
Then they learned to confirm exactly — to confirm a few things exactly, each under very specific circumstances.
As they emphasized exact confirmation, their techniques inevitably became less flexible.
The connection of the most used techniques with past insights was weakened.
Anything to which a confirmatory procedure was not explicitly attached was decried as ‘mere descriptive statistics’, no matter how much we had learned from it.
There is no data that can be displayed in a pie chart,
that cannot be displayed BETTER in some other type of chart.
In our opinion, Tukey was one of the greatest data analysts of all time
He coined the terms “bits” and “software”
He was a professor at Princeton and executive director at Bell Labs
He was an eminent statistician making many important contributions including:
Techniques for “robust analysis“
Approaches to exploratory data analysis
Developing graphing and plotting methods
Numerous publications on time series analysis
Fast Fourier transform– critical today in the fields of physics and electrical engineering