Leland Wilkinson

Leland Wilkinson (born c. 1945) is a statistician and computer scientist at H2O.ai, the makers of H2O (software), 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 focuses on scientific visualization and statistical graphics. In these communities he is well known for his book The Grammar of Graphics, which was the foundation for the R package ggplot2.

He is the son of Mr. and Mrs Kirk C. Wilkinson. He is brother of Alec Wilkinson, a writer for New Yorker. He was married to Reverend Ruth VanDemark, who died in 2012, and is the father of Amie Wilkinson, a professor of mathematics at University of Chicago, and Caroline Wilkinson, a writer. He married Marilyn Vogel, an attorney, in 2013.

Wilkinson received an A.B. from Harvard University in 1966, an S.T.B. from Harvard Divinity School in 1969, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale University in 1975. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a full-time faculty member at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). After serving 10 years as Adjunct Professor of Statistics at Northwestern University, he rejoined UIC as Adjunct Professor of Computer Science.

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