John Tukey Quotes

• An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.

  John Tukey

  Science, Data, Answers

  128 Copy quote

• The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

  John Tukey

  Play, Statistics, Backyards

  123 Copy quote

• The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

  John Tukey

  Data, Drawing, Unexpected

  John Wilder Tukey (1977). “Exploratory Data Analysis”, Pearson College Division

  133 Copy quote

• It's better to solve the right problem approximately than to solve the wrong problem exactly.

  John Tukey

  Risk, Management, Problem

  81 Copy quote

• This is my favorite part about analytics: Taking boring flat data and bringing it to life through visualization.

  John Tukey

  Data, Boring, My Favorite

  80 Copy quote

• The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

  John Tukey

  Data, Desire, Body

  "Sunset Salvo" by John Tukey in The American Statistician, Volume 40, No. 1 (pp. 72-76), www.jstor.org. February 1986.

  84 Copy quote

• Be approximately right rather than exactly wrong.

  John Tukey

  John Wilder Tukey, David Roxbee Cox, Henry I. Braun (1994). “The Collected Works of John W. Tukey: Philosophy and principles of data analysis, 1949-1964”

  53 Copy quote

• There is no data that can be displayed in a pie chart, that cannot be displayed BETTER in some other type of chart.

  John Tukey

  Data, Pie, Type

  85 Copy quote

• Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

  John Tukey

  Answers, Statistics, Made

  Annals of Mathematical Statistics, Mar. 1962

  54 Copy quote

• Visualization is often used for evil - twisting insignificant data changes and making them look meaningful. Don't do that crap if you want to be my friend. Present results clearly and honestly. If something isn't working - those reviewing results need to know.

  John Tukey

  Meaningful, Data, Evil

  56 Copy quote

• Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.

  John Tukey

  Focus, Statistics, Unexpected

  48 Copy quote

• When communicating results to non-technical types there is nothing better than a clear visualization to make your point.

  John Tukey

  Results, Type, Communicate

  42 Copy quote

• All we know about the world teaches us that the effects of A and B are always different-in some decimal place-for any A and B. Thus asking "are the effects different?" is foolish.

  John Tukey

  Different, Asking, World

  31 Copy quote

• In a single sentence the moral is: admit that complexity always increases, first from the model you fit to the data, thence to the model you use to think about and plan about the experiment and its analysis, and thence to the true situation.

  John Tukey

  Thinking, Data, Simplicity

  26 Copy quote

• In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation.

  John Tukey

  World, Economics, Increase

  38 Copy quote

• I know of no person or group that is taking nearly adequate advantage of the graphical potentialities of the computer.

  John Tukey

  Groups, Adequate, Computer

  16 Copy quote

• To be able to say that "if we change our point of view in the following way ... things are simpler" is always a gain.

  John Tukey

  Views, Able, Way

  John Wilder Tukey (1977). “Exploratory Data Analysis”, Pearson College Division

  21 Copy quote

• If we are going to make a mark (key 21), it might as well be a meaningful one.

  John Tukey

  Meaningful, Work, Keys

  11 Copy quote

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