William S. Cleveland

William Swain Cleveland II (January 24, 1943 – March 27, 2026) was an American computer scientist, professor of statistics and professor of computer science at Purdue University, known for his work on data visualization, particularly on nonparametric regression and local regression. He was one of the developers of the S programming language.

Early life and career Cleveland obtained his AB in Mathematics mid 1960s from Princeton University, where he graduated under William Feller. For his PhD studies in statistics he moved to Yale University, where he graduated in 1969 under Leonard Jimmie Savage.

After graduation Cleveland started at Bell Labs, where he was staff member of the Statistics Research Department and department head for 12 years. While at Bell Labs, he helped to develop the S programming language, a precursor to R. Cleveland is credited with defining and naming the field of data science, which he did in a 2001 publication.

Retirement and death Cleveland retired in 2025. He died on March 27, 2026, at the age of 83.

Honors and awards Cleveland received the Wilcoxon Award from Technometrics in 1975 and 1977. He received the Youden Prize from Technometrics in 1987 along with Richard A. Becker at Bell Labs for their paper Brushing scatterplots.

In 1982 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

He was named the National Statistician of the Year, Chicago chapter of the American Statistical Association in 1996. In 2016, Cleveland received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Graphics and Computing from the American Statistical Association, and the Parzen Prize for Statistical Innovation from Texas A&M University. In 2021, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Hasselt University.