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D.R. Brillinger 43He went on to be Higgins Professor at Princeton and Associate ExecutiveDirector of Research Information Sciences at Bell TelephoneLaboratories. As a graduate student at Princeton he drew attentionby serving milk instead of the usual beer at his doctoral graduationparty. 12John Tukey was quick, like Richard Feynman. 13 He could keep trackof time while reciting poetry and seemingly do three different thingssimultaneously. I watched him continually, I guess, because I had neverseen anyone quite like him before. He was called upon continually toprovide advice to presidents and other decision makers. He createdwords and phrases like: bit, software, saphe cracking, the jackknife andhis marvelous creation, EDA. 14 He delighted in vague concepts, thingsthat could be made specific in several ways, but were often better leftvague. He worked in many fields including: astronomy, cryptography,psephology, information retrieval, engineering, computing, education,psychology, chemistry, pollution control, and economics.John Tukey was firmly associated with Princeton and Bell Labs. 15Moreover, he had associations with UCLA. For example, I can mentionhis friendship and respect for Will Dixon. Will started your Biostat/Biomathgroup here in 1950 and had been John’s colleague at theFire Control Research Office (FCRO) 16 in World War II.John had the respect of scientists and executives. The Princeton physicistJohn Wheeler 17 wrote:“I believe that the whole country — scientifically, industrially,financially — is better off because of him and bears evidenceof his influence. [···]JohnTukey,likeJohnvonNeumann,was a bouncy and beefy extrovert, with interests andskills in physics as well as mathematics.”AformerPresidentofBellLabs,W.O.Baker 18 said in response to apersonal question:“John was indeed active in the analysis of the Enigma 19 systemand then of course was part of our force in the fiftieswhich did the really historic work on the Soviet codes as well.So he was very effective in that whole operation. [···]Johnhas had an incisive role in each major frontier of telecommunicationsscience and technology: uses of transistors andsolid state; digital and computers.”Dr. Tukey was involved in the construction of the von Neumann computer.In particular, A. Burks wrote:“John Tukey designed the electronic adding circuit we actuallyused in the Institute for Advanced Studies Computer. In