Leland Wilkinson

Leland Wilkinson
Born	(1944-11-05)November 5, 1944
Died	December 10, 2021(2021-12-10) (aged 77) Lake Forest, Illinois, U.S.
Alma mater	Harvard University (A.B.) Harvard Divinity School (S.T.B.) Yale University (Ph.D.)
Known for	The Grammar of Graphics
Spouses	Ruth Elaine VanDemark ​ ​ (m. 1967; died 2012)​ Marilyn Vogel ​ (m. 2013)​
Children	2, including Amie Wilkinson
Relatives	Alec Wilkinson (brother)
Scientific career
Institutions	University of Illinois at Chicago Northwestern University SPSS SYSTAT Software Inc. Skytree, Inc. Tableau Software H2O.ai
Thesis	The effect of involvement on similarity and preference structures  (1975)

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