Tukey was one of the most influential and renowned statisticians of the century. He spent decades as a professor at Princeton, founding its Department of Statistics, and as a researcher at Bell Labs. Around 1946, while at Bell Labs, he created the word "bit" as an abbreviation of "binary digit." Later, in a 1958 article, Tukey said that "software" was "at least as important as the 'hardware' of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like." Both words caught on.

Tukey was home-schooled until he entered Brown University in 1931. After graduating from Brown, he earned three graduate degrees in three years. During World War II, Tukey was said to have helped design the U-2 spy plane.

In the 1970s, he chaired a research committee that sounded the first warnings that aerosol spray cans were damaging the ozone layer. He was the principal founder of the field of exploratory data analysis, and his contributions to the field of statistics are still taught in high school.

Tukey co-developed the Fast Fourier Transform, an algorithm with many uses in the physical sciences. He was part of a group of Princeton professors who inspired the Hubble Space Telescope. During the 1960s and 1970s, he helped design the polls that NBS used to predict and analyze election outcomes.

Tukey first met publicity in the 1950s, when he was appointed by the National Research Council to evaluate the Kinsey Report on Human Sexuality. Tukey believed Kinsey's work to be seriously flawed by Kinsey's selection of samples.

Tukey was the only child of Adah Tasker Tukey, valedictorian of the class of 1898 at Bates College in Maine. Ms. Tasker's closest competitor was her eventual husband, Ralph H. Tukey, who became salutatorian. Classmates referred to them as the couple most likely to give birth to a genius.

Deep Blue was born to greatness, but never quite attained it himself, many observers commented. His death-in a lonely, seedy motel room outside Redmond, Washington, surrounded by empty liquor bottles and refuse from Microsoft's trash bins-leaves a host of unanswered questions.

Local police declined to speculate as to cause of death, but Blue was known to be depressed because it had been some time since he broke a major story. Friends speculated that he was poring over Microsoft discards in hopes of finding something overlooked by the detective agencies hired by Sun Corporation.

Blue counted among his ancestors his grandfather, the well-known comedian Ben Blue, as well as an uncle who became a giant in the art world, Cobalt Blue. An aunt, Royal, married the legendary "Red Prince" Hal of Denmark. A distant cousin, Navy, led the attack on Iraq's submarine fleet during Desert Storm.

Blue was born in 1952 at the family compound in Blue Bayou. He began his career as a songwriter, and scored a notable hit with his autobiographical ballad, "Call Me Mister Blue," and a sequel, "She Wore Blue Velvet." But he was unable to follow up on those successes and slipped from public view. His closest friend from that period, Al Green, said, "Deep was a whole lot smarter than people thought. He just couldn't seem to make his ideas simple enough for pop songs." In fact, the phrase, "That's a Deep subject" is thought to have originated as a reference to a topic so complex only Deep Blue would try to turn it into a song.

After sampling a series of occupations, Blue settled on writing but his first book, Blue Like Me, was widely panned as imitative and soon landed on remainder tables. He drifted from job to job, until a chance meeting with Tony Barcellos, the legendary editor of Sacra Blue.

Barcellos took a chance on Blue, counting on his skills as an editor to keep Blue in check, and it paid off handsomely. This collaboration became so close that the two "became almost one person," said a mutual colleague. Blue's best work was widely acknowledged to be during the Barcellos era, although succeeding editors were similarly supportive.

After a private service and cremation, Deep Blue's ashes will be scattered along the banks of his favorite river, the Danube.

Digital flowers may be emailed to the Blue Family.

Portwood became an animator for Walt Disney when he was 17,working on films like Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, and Peter Pan. He also worked on the Jiminy Cricket animations that introduced parts of the Disney television program.

Later, he commuted regularly between Sebastopol and Berkeley, passing through San Rafael, where he made friends at Broderbund. He was offered, and accepted, a job with the company.

Portwood and Lauren Elliott are credited with dreaming up the Carmen Sandiego character. Douglas Carlston, one of the founders of Broderbund, said Portwood was "one of the most key guys" in developing Carmen Sandiego.

The games feature a criminal named Carmen Sandiego, whose gang members cause trouble around the world, often stealing locally-significant treasures. The player becomes a detective pursuing, identifying, and arresting the criminal.

The Carmen Sandiego games won praise from educators for their emphasis on research skills, and helped make Broderbund one of the leading electronic game publishers.