''They were afraid that if he went to school, he'd get lazy,'"

David Leonhardt:

An intense man who liked to argue and was fond of helping other researchers, Mr. Tukey was also an amateur linguist who made significant contributions to the language of modern times. In a 1958 article in American Mathematical Monthly, he became the first person to define the programs on which electronic calculators ran, said Fred R. Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School who is editing a book on the origin of terms. Three decades before the founding of Microsoft, Mr. Tukey saw that ''software,'' as he called it, was gaining prominence. ''Today,'' he wrote at the time, it is ''at least as important'' as the '' 'hardware' of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like.''

Much more on John Tukey, here.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 27, 2013 7:40 AM
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