Remembering John W. Tukey

Abstract

In the morning of Tuesday, July 25, 2000, I went to the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick to visit John Tukey. In that labyrinthine hospital I had to ask several times for directions before I found his room. It was a double room and in one bed there was a young man, semiconscious and complaining. On the other bed John W. Tukey lay totally unconscious. The nurse who was trying to wake him explained that, He had some tests done this morning and is still under the effect of the drugs given for the tests. Do you know who this man is? I asked. She replied, He is a statistician. Yesterday I was joking with him about the mode and the median that I studied when I was in school. I said, he is much more than a statistician. Please make sure that he'll be well cared for. Oh, he should be OK, she assured me, His condition is reversible. But John was not reacting well to the treatment, and other doctors and nurses came in to assist. I left the room and called John's home in Princeton. Mary Bittrich, his secretary from Bell Labs, was at the house and answered the phone. I told her that John did not look very well, and that it would be a good idea for someone else to come to the hospital to watch over him. Mary said that Khris Quicksall, the woman who had been assisting John since 1998, was on her way to the hospital, and that Phyllis Anscombe, John's sisterin-law, and other members of his family would soon be going. After Khris arrived at the hospital I left. For the rest of that day I was afraid to call Mary back. Then at 1:30 AM my phone rang. It was Khris to tell me the bad news: at 1 AM on July 26, John Wilder Tukey had passed away. I had talked to John the previous week when he was staying at the Merwick Rehabilitation Center in Princeton. There he seemed to have regained some