From the NY Times & The San Francisco Chronicle:

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Saturday, July 29, 2000

John Wilder Tukey, one of the most influential statisticians of the past 50
years and a wide-ranging thinker credited with inventing the words
``software'' and ``bit,'' died July 26 in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 85.

The cause was a heart attack after a short illness, said Phyllis Anscombe,
his sister-in-law.

Professor Tukey developed important theories about how to analyze data and
compute series of numbers quickly. He spent decades as both a professor at
Princeton University and a researcher at AT&T's Bell Laboratories, and his
ideas continue to be a part of both doctoral statistics courses and high
school mathematics classes. In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon awarded him
the National Medal of Science.

But Professor Tukey frequently ventured outside of the academy as well,
working as a consultant to the government and corporations and taking part in
social debates.

In the 1950s, he criticized Alfred C. Kinsey's research on sexual behavior as
being seriously flawed because it relied on a sample of people who knew each
other. Professor Tukey said a random selection of three people would have
been better than a group of 300 chosen by Kinsey.

In the 1970s, Professor Tukey was chairman of a research committee that
warned that aerosol spray cans damaged the ozone layer. More recently, he
recommended that the 1990 Census be adjusted by using statistical formulas in
order to count poor urban residents whom he believed it had missed.

``The best thing about being a statistician,'' he once told a colleague, ``is
that you get to play in everyone's backyard.''

An intense man who liked to argue and was fond of helping other researchers,
Professor Tukey was also an amateur linguist who made significant
contributions to the language of modern times. In a 1958 article in American
Mathematical Monthly, he became the first person to define the programs on
which electronic calculators ran, said Fred R. Shapiro, a librarian at Yale
Law School who is editing a book on the origin of terms. Three decades before
the founding of Microsoft, Professor Tukey saw that ``software,'' as he
called it, was gaining prominence. ``Today,'' he wrote at the time, it is
``at least as important'' as the `` `hardware' of tubes, transistors, wires,
tapes and the like.''

Twelve years earlier, while working at Bell Laboratories, he had coined the
term ``bit,'' an abbreviation of ``binary digit'' that described the 1's and
0's that are the basis of computer programs.

Both words caught on, to the chagrin of some computer scientists who saw
Professor Tukey as an outsider. ``Not everyone was happy that he was naming
things in their field,'' said Steven M. Schultz, a spokesman for Princeton.

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