Leland Wilkinson

Leland Wilkinson (November 5, 1944 – December 10, 2021) was an American statistician and computer scientist at 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 . His research focused on scientific visualization and statistical graphics. In these communities he was well known for his book The Grammar of Graphics, He is the brother of Alec Wilkinson, a writer for The New Yorker. He graduated from the Trinity-Pawling School in Pawling, New York. His thesis was titled The effect of involvement on similarity and preference structures.

Professional career Wilkinson wrote SYSTAT, a statistical software package, in the early 1980s. This program was noted for its comprehensive graphics, 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 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. This book also served as the foundation for the R package ggplot2, the Python Bokeh package, the R package ggbio, the Vega declarative language, and helped shape the Polaris project at Stanford University.

Wilkinson served as the vice president of statistics at Tableau Software, where he continued to work on scientific visualization and statistical graphics. he remained in that role until his death in 2021.

Personal life Wilkinson married Reverend Ruth Elaine VanDemark on June 23, 1967. Together, they were the parents of Amie Wilkinson, a professor of mathematics at University of Chicago, and Caroline Wilkinson, a writer. He later married Marilyn Vogel.

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

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. Wilkinson received the National Institute of Statistical Sciences Distinguished Service Award in 2010.