John Wilder Tukey

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the life of John Wilder Tukey, who was a mathematician. It describes Tukey's upbringing and his introduction to mathematics. The paper discusses Tukey's most important statistical work, which was the way he presented his evaluation of "spectra time series". It then describes the three major contributions of Tukey according to Regents of the University of Minnesota.

From the Paper:

"Tukey's first official school was at Brown University where he took both his Bachelor's Degree and the Master's Degree in Chemistry. Since he was interested in mathematics, he pursued his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1937. Lefschetz supervised Tukey's research and Tukey eventually received his doctorate in 1939 with a dissertation in Denumerability in topology that was published in 1940 as Convergence and uniformity in topology (O'Connor and Robertson, 2004)."
"Tukey became a mathematics instructor at Princeton and joined other famous statisticians and mathematicians during the World War II to study the statistical mathematical problems of artilleries and weapons. This study covered the computations and calculations of how to accurately target traveling objects. In 1945, he was enlisted at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill. By 1965, he wrote a manuscript entitled Mathematics in Computation with J. W. Cooley wherein he presented the Fourier transform algorithm."

Sample of Sources Used:

• O'Connor J. and Robertson, E. (2004) "John Wilder Tukey" [Online] Available at: <http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Printonly/Tukey.html>
• Regents of the University of Minnesota (2004) "John Wilder Tukey" [Online] Available at: <http://www.mrs.umn.edu/~sungurea/introstat/history/w98/Tukey.html>

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