This document contains several quotes and thoughts from John Tukey, an eminent statistician. Some of his insights include that an approximate answer to the right question is better than an exact answer to the wrong question. He also noted that as statisticians emphasized exact confirmation, their techniques became less flexible and disconnected from past insights. Additionally, Tukey believed that any data that can be shown in a pie chart can be displayed better in another type of chart.

1. Great thoughts from John Tukey
...Far better an approximate answer
to the right question,
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2. Great thoughts from John Tukey
...Far better an approximate answer
to the right question,
than the exact answer
to the wrong question,
which can always be made precise....
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4. Great thoughts from John Tukey
Once upon a time statisticians only explored.
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5. Great thoughts from John Tukey
Once upon a time statisticians only explored.
Then they learned to confirm exactly –
to confirm a few things exactly,
each under very specific circumstances.
As they emphasized exact confirmation,
their techniques inevitably became less flexible.
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6. Great thoughts from John Tukey
Once upon a time statisticians only explored.
Then they learned to confirm exactly - to confirm a few things exactly,
each under very specific circumstances.
As they emphasized exact confirmation, their techniques inevitably
became less flexible.
The connection of the most used techniques
with past insights was weakened.
Anything to which a confirmatory procedure
was not explicitly attached was decried
as 'mere descriptive statistics',
no matter how much we had learned from it.
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8. Great thoughts from John Tukey
There is no data
that can be displayed in a pie chart,
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9. Great thoughts from John Tukey
There is no data
that can be displayed in a pie chart,
that cannot be displayed BETTER
in some other type of chart.
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11. Great thoughts from John Tukey
In our opinion, Tukey was one of the greatest data analysts of all time
He coined the terms “bits” and “software”
He was a professor at Princeton and executive director at Bell Labs
He was an eminent statistician making many important contributions
including:
Techniques for "robust analysis"
Approaches to exploratory data analysis
Developing graphing and plotting methods
Numerous publications on time series analysis
Fast Fourier transform- critical today in the fields of physics
and electrical engineering
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