Adventures of a Statistician: The Biography of John W. Tukey

Meet John W. Tukey, one of the most consequential statisticians and original thinkers of the twentieth century.* Growing up one hundred years ago in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a large coastal town primarily known for its commercial fishing and textile industries, John Wilder Tukey quickly showed himself to be a child prodigy. The son of educated parents whose high school classmates voted them most likely to give birth to a genius, he learned to read on his own by three years of age, mastered using a hand-crack desk calculator to speed up arithmetical calculations shortly thereafter, and was poring through technical journals in the New Bedford Free Public Library by the time he was a teenager. Homeschooled until being admitted to Brown University, Tukey majored in chemistry there--even as he spent countless hours in the university library compiling lists of statistical techniques on index cards, simply because he found them interesting and useful. With multiple degrees in hand,