A statistician and researcher for AT&T’s Bell Labs, Tukey worked on how to analyze and display data. In the 1960s, he designed polls for NBC television’s election coverage.
But he’s best known for his contributions to another field: computing. In 1958, he coined the term “software”, noting the instructions that run computers are “at least as important” as the “‘hardware’ of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like.” In 1946, he coined the term “bit”, a contraction of “binary” and “digit”. Tukey died July 26 in New Jersey from a heart attack. He was 85.