Tukeys

Tukeys refers to a surname and to a set of concepts and methods named after individuals bearing that name, most prominently John W. Tukey, an American statistician. In scholarly use, the term often appears in the possessive form in names of statistical procedures and data-analysis tools.

John W. Tukey (1915–2000) was a influential American statistician who helped shape modern data analysis and computation. He co-developed the fast Fourier transform algorithm with James Cooley, a foundational method for efficient numerical analysis of signals. Tukey also championed exploratory data analysis, emphasizing graphical techniques and data-driven investigation. His work popularized boxplots (often referred to as Tukey’s boxplot) and inspired broad use of graphical summaries in statistics.

Numerous statistical methods and distributions bear Tukey’s name. Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD) test and Tukey’s range test are post-hoc procedures used in ANOVA for multiple comparisons. Other eponymous concepts include Tukey depth (also known as halfspace depth), Tukey lambda distribution, and Tukey’s biweight function, all of which have found use in robust statistics and data analysis. The umbrella of Tukeys in statistics thus covers a range of graphical tools, post-hoc testing procedures, and robust estimation approaches attributed to Tukey or closely associated with his work.

In common usage, references to Tukeys typically point to the family name and to the set of methods and ideas named after John Tukey. While the surname may refer to multiple individuals, John Tukey remains the best-known figure associated with the term in statistics and data analysis.