TITLE: Tukey's contributions to jackknife and experimental design: a historical perspective

SPEAKER:  Dr. Jeff Wu

ABSTRACT:

Tukey has made wide-ranging contributions to statistics and other branches of science. Much less known is his early and unpublished work on experimental design. I will start my talk with his work on the jackknife and how it influenced Efron's work on the bootstrap. Also little known is that the core technical idea of his path-breaking work on Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was rooted in experimental design, i.e., use of the Yates' algorithm. His unpublished work on studentized maximum modulus test was "rediscovered" in the Wu-Hamada book. His 1959 unpublished notes called "Little pieces of mixed factorials" was absolutely ahead of his time. I will explain some novel ideas in the notes and relate them to later development in design construction and speculate how it could have made even more impact.

(Notes: I gave this talk in the spring of 2000 a few months before his death. The talk was part of a one-day celebration of Tukey in the ASA New Jersey chapter. He was in the audience. Some of the contents of this talk remain fresh to these days. It speaks volumes about Tukey's ever lasting impact.)