Leland Wilkinson

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Leland Wilkinson

Leland Wilkinson (November 5, 1944 – December 10, 2021)


Leland Wilkinson
was an American statistician and computer scientist at H2O.ai
and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at University of
Illinois at Chicago. Wilkinson developed the SYSTAT statistical
package in the early 1980s, sold it to SPSS in 1995, and worked
at SPSS for 10 years recruiting and managing the visualization
team. He left SPSS in 2008 and became Executive VP of
SYSTAT Software Inc. in Chicago. He then served as the VP of
Data Visualization at Skytree, Inc and VP of Statistics at Tableau
Software before joining H2O.ai. His research focused on
scientific visualization and statistical graphics. In these
communities he was well known for his book The Grammar of
Graphics,[1] which was the foundation for the R package
ggplot2. Born November 5, 1944
Died December 10, 2021
Early life (aged 77)
Lake Forest, Illinois,
Wilkinson was born on November 5, 1944 to Kirk C. Wilkinson,
U.S.
an art editor of Woman's Day magazine.[2][3] He is the brother of
Alec Wilkinson, a writer for The New Yorker. He graduated from Alma mater Harvard University
the Trinity-Pawling School in Pawling, New York.[3] (A.B.)
Harvard Divinity School
Wilkinson received a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University (S.T.B.)
in 1966,[3] a Bachelor of Sacred Theology from Harvard
Divinity School in 1969, and a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale Yale University (Ph.D.)
University in 1975.[4] His thesis was titled The effect of Known for The Grammar of
involvement on similarity and preference structures.[4] Graphics
Spouses Ruth Elaine VanDemark
Career (m. 1967; died 2012)
Marilyn Vogel (m. 2013)

Academic career Children 2, including Amie


Wilkinson
While attending Yale between 1974 and 1976, he served as an Relatives Alec Wilkinson (brother)
instructor of psychology. He became an assistant professor of
Scientific career
psychology at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 1976
and was promoted to associate professor in 1980. In 1991, he Institutions University of Illinois at
became an adjunct professor of statistics at Northwestern Chicago
University. He remained in that role until 2010. He rejoined UIC
Northwestern University
in 2007 as an adjunct professor of computer science.[4]
SPSS
SYSTAT Software Inc.
Skytree, Inc.
Wilkinson was recognized as the primary author of the 1999 Tableau Software
American Psychological Association's guidelines for statistical
H2O.ai
methods in psychology journals.[5]
Thesis The effect of
involvement on
Professional career similarity and
preference
Wilkinson wrote SYSTAT, a statistical software package, in the
structures (1975)
early 1980s. This program was noted for its comprehensive
graphics,[6] including the first software implementation of the
heatmap display now widely used among biologists. After his company grew to 50 employees, he sold it to
SPSS in 1995. At SPSS, he assembled a team of graphics programmers who developed the nViZn platform
[7] that produces the visualizations in SPSS, Clementine, and other analytics products. The nViZn platform

was modeled after Wilkinson's 1999 book on statistical graphics, The Grammar of Graphics.[1] This book
also served as the foundation for the R package ggplot2,[8] the Python Bokeh package,[9] the R package
ggbio,[10] the Vega (https://vega.github.io/vega/) declarative language, and helped shape the Polaris project
at Stanford University.[11]

Wilkinson served as the vice president of statistics at Tableau Software, where he continued to work on
scientific visualization and statistical graphics.[12] In 2016, he became a chief scientist at H2O.ai to lead a
data visualization push;[13] he remained in that role until his death.[12]

Personal life
Wilkinson married Reverend Ruth Elaine VanDemark on June 23, 1967.[3] She died in 2012.[14] Together,
they were the parents of Amie Wilkinson, a professor of mathematics at University of Chicago, and
Caroline Wilkinson, a writer.[15] He later married Marilyn Vogel.[16]

Wilkinson died on December 10, 2021, at Northwestern Lake Forest Hospital, in Lake Forest, Illinois.[17]

Awards
Wilkinson became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1998 and a Fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009. He was an elected member of the International
Statistical Institute in 2006.[4] Wilkinson received the National Institute of Statistical Sciences Distinguished
Service Award in 2010.[4]

References
1. Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics, Springer, 1999. ISBN 0-387-98774-6. at
Springer (https://www.springer.com/statistics/computational/book/978-0-387-24544-7)
2. Wilkinson, Leland; Wills, Graham; Wills, D.; Dubbs, R.; Norton, A. (2006). The Grammar of
Graphics (https://books.google.com/books?id=NRyGnjeNKJIC&pg=PA98). p. 98.
3. "Ruth VanDemark becomes a bride" (https://www.nytimes.com/1967/06/24/archives/ruth-van
demark-becomes-a-bride.html). The New York Times. June 24, 1967. Retrieved
December 14, 2021.
4. "Leland Wilkinson" (https://web.archive.org/web/20061110113526/http://www.spss.com/rese
arch/wilkinson/Publications/wilkinsonvita.pdf) (PDF). SPSS. 2005. Archived from the
original (http://www.spss.com/research/wilkinson/Publications/wilkinsonvita.pdf) (PDF) on
November 10, 2006. Retrieved December 14, 2021.
5. Osborne, Jason W. (2013). Best Practices in Data Cleaning (https://books.google.com/book
s?id=-5-9GDCQPHoC&pg=PA13). p. 13.
6. Jarrett, Jeffrey (1992). "SYSTAT/SYGRAPH and Micro-TSP". Statistics and Computing. 2
(4): 231–236. doi:10.1007/BF01889683 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2FBF01889683).
S2CID 119499841 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:119499841).
7. Jones, Lacey; Symanzik, Jürgen. "Statistical Visualization of Environmental Data on the
Web Using nViZn" (https://web.archive.org/web/20111005214627/http://www.galaxy.gmu.ed
u/interface/I01/I2001Proceedings/LJones/LJones.pdf) (PDF). Archived from the original (htt
p://www.galaxy.gmu.edu/interface/I01/I2001Proceedings/LJones/LJones.pdf) (PDF) on
October 5, 2011.
8. "ggplot2: Create Elegant Data Visualisations Using the Grammar of Graphics" (https://cran.r-
project.org/web/packages/ggplot2/index.html). CRAN (R programming language). June 25,
2021. Retrieved December 14, 2021.
9. "Bokeh" (https://github.com/ContinuumIO/Bokeh). GitHub. Retrieved July 17, 2013.
10. Lawrence, Michael (2012). "ggbio: an R package for extending the grammar of graphics for
genomic data" (https://web.archive.org/web/20160128172357/http://genomebiology.com/201
2/13/8/R77). Genome Biology. 13 (8): R77. doi:10.1186/gb-2012-13-8-r77 (https://doi.org/10.
1186%2Fgb-2012-13-8-r77). PMC 4053745 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC
4053745). PMID 22937822 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22937822). Archived from the
original (http://genomebiology.com/2012/13/8/R77) on January 28, 2016. Retrieved July 17,
2013.
11. "Polaris, interactive database visualization" (http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects/polari
s/). Stanford University. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20211021043340/http://graphi
cs.stanford.edu/projects/polaris/) from the original on October 21, 2021. Retrieved
December 14, 2021.
12. "VP, STATISTICS | Leland Wilkinson" (https://research.tableau.com/user/leland-wilkinson).
research.tableau.com. Tableau Research. Retrieved December 14, 2021. "His research
focused on scientific visualization and statistical graphics. He later moved on to be the Chief
Scientist at H2O.ai, working on machine learning algorithms and visualization methods for
big data until his passing on December 10, 2021."
13. Zakrzewski, Cat (April 20, 2016). "Machine Learning Co. H2O.ai Hires Leland Wilkinson to
Lead Data Visualization Drive" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/machine-learning-co-h2o-ai-hir
es-leland-wilkinson-to-lead-data-visualization-drive-1461159049). The Wall Street Journal.
Retrieved December 14, 2021.
14. "Rev. Ruth E. Van Demark 1944–2012" (https://www.isba.org/barnews/2012/07/19/rev-ruth-e
-van-demark-1944-2012). Illinois State Bar Association. July 19, 2012. Retrieved
December 14, 2021.
15. "Ruth E. VanDemark (1944–2012) – Obituary" (https://www.michalikfuneralhome.com/obitua
ry/1504186). michalikfuneralhome.com. 2012. Retrieved December 14, 2021.
16. Hauser, Alisa (February 10, 2014). "Victorian Mansion on Wicker Park's Beer Baron's Row
Sells for $2.3 Million" (https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20140210/wicker-park/victorian-ma
nsion-on-wicker-parks-beer-barons-row-sells-for-23-million/). DNAinfo. Retrieved
December 14, 2021.
17. "Leland Wilkinson, creator of The Grammar of Graphics, passed away" (https://flowingdata.c
om/2021/12/13/leland-wilkinson-creator-of-the-grammar-of-graphics-passed-away/).
FlowingData. December 13, 2021. Retrieved December 14, 2021.
External links
Leland Wilkinson's academic home page (http://www.cs.uic.edu/~wilkinson/)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leland_Wilkinson&oldid=1165623349"

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