(1915-2000) Statistician who helped introduce computers to the field of statistics. He spent many decades as a professor at Princeton University and a researcher at Bell Labs. Among his contributions are:
- Coining the word software in a 1958 article of the American Mathematical Monthly.
- Coining the word bit in 1946, while at Bell Labs.
- Development of many robust methods in statistics, which are techniques resistant to small sample sizes and outliers. An example of a robust technique is the use of the median instead of the mean, since the median is less easily influenced by a small number of extreme values.
- Development of exploratory data analysis, a set of techniques for analyzing and describing data primarily using graphics.
- Discovery (along with James Cooley) of the Fast Fourier Transform in 1965. (Actually a rediscovery; Gauss invented it 150 years earlier.)